Principles of Organisation & Management

Lecture 2 : Theory X & Y
Prof. Prasad threw light on the two basic styles of management

1. Authoritarian management style (say X)
2. Participative management style (say Y)

On the basis of nature of employee and manager's perception of the same, these styles are further sub-categorized. Please refer the table below :

Category of Manager	Type of Employees	Manager’s perception of Employees	Remarks
X1	Lazy	He assumes that his employees are lazy	Authoritarian style Not good for the health of the          organization &employees
X2	Good	He assumes that his employees are lazy
Y1	Lazy	He assumes that his employees are good	Participative style Conducive to the growth of the organization & employees
Y2	Good	He assumes that his employees are good

X1 Category : While working in an organization, the most common thing which we come across is- “Bosses criticizing their subordinates for not meeting the deadlines or not performing at par to his expectations”. Do we real feel that only criticizing or scolding a lazy employee would make him perform better ?  Of course not. Employees are lazy and manager assumes that they are lazy. Manager thinks that no matter what he does, situation is not going be better. He (Manager) does not have faith in his employees and never inspire them to work harder & give their 100 %.

  X2 Category : This is the scenario where employees are not lazy but manager assumes that they are lazy. This is one of the most dangerous management style as it discourages the talent pool of highly efficient & hard working employees of the organisation. As per my experience of industry, there can be two cases when the manager behaves like this. One, when he himself carry a negative attitude that whatever attributes others possess are not up to the mark. He never get satisfied with the output of his employees, so never appreciates his team. Second, which most of us might have experienced, when manager deliberately criticizes his employee's work or better to say do not appreciates it just to show his bossism or to maintain discipline within the team. In both the cases, either the employee stop working, stop taking new initiatives or switch to some other organisation.

Y1 Category : This is the scenario where employees are lazy but manager assumes that they are efficient & hard working. This is the attitude which every manager should possess. In an organisation, not every employee is self-motivated. And even if there are lazy employees then also fault lies on the management side because they are responsible for their recruitment. Managers motivate these employees with compliments on their small achievements which make them pull their strings and start working hard.

Y2 Category : In this kind of a scenario employees are not lazy and the manager also assumes them to be efficient and hard working. This is the most sought for situation in any organization. Efficient and hard working employees' effort is constantly recognized by the manager and the organisation progresses towards its goal in an efficient way.

Lecture 1

The first lecture of POM started with Dr.Prasad giving us insights on looking at our 2 year MBA program at NITIE from an all new perspective which i had never thought of. He talked about our opportunity cost of MBA. He emphasized that there is no greatness in just spending the  money which you have not earned to get a degree. Greatness is in earning that money we spent here till the time we passout.

Then, Dr. Prasad clearly distinguished between efficiency & effectiveness.These are two most valuable tools of management which when used together can result excellence.

EXCELLENCE = Efficiency x Effectiveness.

Effectiveness is about what to do, how to do and why to do whereas, Efficiency is how good, how fast or how efficiently we are doing that task.

Tower building exercise :

The tower building exercise is one of the best ways of exhibiting efficiency, effectiveness and ultimately excellence. In this exercise a tower of blocks was to be built by a person using his odd hand. The selected person was supposed to predict the number of blocks he would be able to stack and the students were asked to note down their predictions.

The builder predicted 10 blocks but was able to build a tower of 18 blocks, showing that people often underrate their strengths and capabilities and thus lower their goal then what they can actually achieve. The target set should always be greater than the organisation's assessment of what might its actual performance will be. This in turn will lead to an increase in capability, leading to an ever increasing limit of goals that can be set.

Now, the rules of the game were changed and this time the person was supposed to play blind folded. Students were again made to guess the number of cubes he would stack and almost everybody came down with their numbers.

This was a simple situation illustrating how we lower our goals at difficult times.  Learning was that we should always set the target higher than our potential. Then only, we will stretch ourself to the fullest to achieve that target which is excellence.