human resource theory, or the organizational behavior ... · our basic assumptions about the...

149

CHAPTER 3

Human Resource Theory, or the Organizational Behavior Perspective

Students and practitioners of management have always been interested in and con-cerned with the behavior of people in organizations. But fundamental assumptions

about the behavior of people at work did not change dramatically from the beginning of humankind’s attempts to organize until only a few decades ago. Using the traditional “the boss knows best” mindset (set of assumptions), Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), the German-born psychologist whose later work at Harvard would earn him the title “father of industrial or applied psychology,” pioneered the application of psychological fi ndings from laboratory experiments to practical matters. He sought to match the abilities of new hires with a company’s work demands, to positively infl uence employee attitudes toward their work and their company, and to understand the impact of psychological conditions on employee productivity (H. Münsterberg, 1913; M. Münsterberg, 1922). Münsterberg’s approach characterized how the behavioral sciences tended to be applied in organizations well into the 1950s. During and following World War II, the armed services were particu-larly active in conducting and sponsoring research into how the military could best fi nd and shape people to fi t its needs.

In contrast to the Münsterberg-type perspective on organizational behavior, the “mod-ern breed” of applied behavioral scientists has focused attention on seeking to answer ques-tions such as how organizations could and should allow and encourage their people to grow and develop. From this perspective, it is assumed that organizational creativity, fl exibility, and prosperity fl ow naturally from employee growth and development. The essence of the relationship between organizations and people is redefi ned from dependence to codepen-dence. People are considered to be as important as or more important than the organization itself. Current organizational behavior methods and techniques could not have been used in Hugo Münsterberg’s days because we didn’t believe (assume) that codependence was the “right” relationship between an organization and its employees.

Although practitioners and researchers have always been interested in the behavior of people inside organizations, it has only been in the past 50 years—since about 1957—that our basic assumptions about the relationship between organizations and people truly began to change and the organizational behavior perspective, or human resource theory, came into being. Those who see organizations through the “lenses” of the organizational behavior per-spective focus on people, groups, and the relationships among them and the organizational environment. Because the organizational behavior perspective places a very high value on humans as individuals, things typically are done openly, including providing employees with information they need to make informed decisions with free will about their future (Argyris, 1970).

69410_03_ch03_p149-196.indd 14969410_03_ch03_p149-196.indd 149 8/21/09 5:56:30 PM8/21/09 5:56:30 PM

150 Human Resource Theory, or the Organizational Behavior Perspective

Human resource theory draws on a body of research and theory built around the following assumptions:

1. Organizations exist to serve human needs (not the reverse). 2. Organizations and people need each other (Organizations need ideas, energy, and talent;

people need careers, salaries, and work opportunities.). 3. When the fi t between the individual and the organization is poor, one or both will suffer.

Individuals will be exploited, or will seek to exploit the organization, or both. 4. A good fi t between individual and organization benefi ts both. Humans fi nd meaningful and

satisfying work, and organizations get the human talent and energy that they need (Bolman & Deal, 2003).

No other theory or perspective of organizations has ever had such a wealth of research fi ndings and methods at its disposal.

The single most signifi cant set of events that preceded and presaged a conscious the-ory (and fi eld) of organizational behavior was the multiyear work done by the Elton Mayo team at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company beginning in 1927 (Mayo, 1933; Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939). It is important to note that the Mayo team began its work trying to fi t into the mold of classical organization theory thinking. The team phrased its questions in the language and concepts industry was accustomed to using in order to see and explain problems such as productivity in relation to such factors as the amount of light, the rate of fl ow of materials, and alternative wage payment plans. The Mayo team succeeded in making signifi cant breakthroughs in understanding only after it redefi ned the Hawthorne problems as social psychological problems—problems conceptu-alized in such terms as interpersonal relations in groups, group norms, control over one’s own environment, and personal recognition. It was only after the Mayo team achieved this breakthrough that it became the “grandfather”—the direct precursor—of the fi eld of organ-izational behavior and human resource theory. The Hawthorne studies laid the foundation for a set of assumptions that would be fully articulated and would displace the assumptions of classical organization theory twenty years later. The experiments were the emotional and intellectual wellspring of the organizational behavior perspective and modern theories of motivation; they showed that complex, interacting variables make the difference in motivating people—things like attention paid to workers as individuals, workers’ control over their own work, differences between individuals’ needs, management’s willingness to listen, group norms, and direct feedback.

According to human resource theory, the organization is not the independent variable to be manipulated in order to change behavior (as a dependent variable), even though organizations pay employees to help them achieve organizational goals. Instead, the organization must be seen as the context in which behavior occurs. It is both an independent and a dependent variable. The organization infl uences human behavior just as behavior shapes the organization. The interactions shape conceptualizations of jobs, human communication and interaction in work groups, the impact of participation in decisions about one’s own work in general, and the roles of leaders in particular.

It should be evident that human resource organization theory is an enormous fi eld of study supported by a large body of literature both because it addresses numerous subfi elds and because it has so much research available for use. In this chapter, we can only introduce a few of its most important ideas and best-known authors. For a more thorough presentation, we


Human Resource Theory, or the Organizational Behavior Perspective 151

suggest the fourth edition of the anthology compiled by Ott, Parkes, and Simpson (2008), Classic Readings in Organizational Behavior. Ott, Parkes, and Simpson group the literature of human resource theory by its most pervasive themes:

leadership;• motivation;• individuals in teams and groups;• effects of the work environment;• power and infl uence; and• organizational change.•

In this chapter, we have limited the selections to a few classic readings on leadership, motivation, and group dynamics. The fi rst article reprinted here is a truly pioneering trea-tise on the situational or contingency approach to leadership, “The Giving of Orders,” by Mary Parker Follett. Follett discusses how orders should be given in any organization: They should be depersonalized “to unite all concerned in a study of the situation, to discover the law of the situation and obey that.” Follett thus argues for a participatory leadership style, whereby employees and employers cooperate to assess the situation and decide what should be done at that moment in that situation. Once the “law” of the situation is dis-covered, “the employee can issue it to the employer as well as employer to employee.” This manner of giving orders facilitates better attitudes within an organization because nobody is necessarily under another person; rather, all take their cues from the situation.

In 1924, a team of researchers under the aegis of the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council went to the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company, near Chicago, to study ways for improving productivity. The research team began its work from the perspective of scientifi c management. Scientifi c investigative procedures were used to fi nd and identify environmental changes that would increase worker productivity. The investigations focused on room temperature, humidity, and illumination levels. By 1927, the results were so snarled that Western Electric and the National Research Council were ready to abandon the entire endeavor. In that year, though, George Pennock, Western Electric’s superintendent of inspection, heard Harvard professor Elton Mayo speak at a meeting and invited him to take a team to Hawthorne. Team members eventually included Frederick (Fritz) Roethlisberger, George Homans, and T. N. Whitehead. The results were the legendary “Hawthorne studies.” Roethlisberger became the best-known chronicler of the studies and, with William J. Dickson of the Western Electric Company, wrote the most comprehensive account of them, Management and the Worker (1939). Roethlisberger’s chapter, “The Hawthorne Experiments,” which is reprinted here, is from his shorter 1941 book, Management and Morale.

All discussions of motivation start with Abraham Maslow. His hierarchy of needs stands alongside the Hawthorne experiments and Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y as the points of departure for studying motivation in organizations. An overview of Maslow’s basic theory of needs is presented here from his 1943 Psychological Review article, “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Maslow’s theoretical premises can be summa-rized in a few phrases:

All humans have needs that underlie their motivational structure.• As lower levels of needs are satisfi ed, they no longer “drive” behavior.•



Satisfi ed needs are not motivators.• As lower-level needs of workers become satisfi ed, higher-order needs take over as the • motivating forces.

Maslow’s theory has been attacked frequently. Few empirical studies have supported it, and it oversimplifi es the complex structure of human needs and motivations. Several modifi ed needs hierarchies have been proposed over the years that are reportedly better able to withstand empirical testing (for example, Alderfer, 1969). Despite the criticisms and the continuing advances across the spectrum of applied behavioral sciences, Abraham Maslow’s theory continues to occupy a most honored and prominent place in organiza-tional behavior and management textbooks.

Between 1957 and 1960, the organizational behavior perspective exploded onto the organization scene. On April 9, 1957, Douglas M. McGregor delivered the fi fth anniver-sary convocation address to the School of Industrial Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He titled his address “The Human Side of Enterprise.” McGregor expanded his talk into some of the most infl uential articles and books in the history of organizational behavior and organization theory. In “The Human Side of Enterprise,” McGregor explained how managerial assumptions about employees become self-fulfi lling prophecies. He labeled his two sets of contrasting assumptions Theory X and Theory Y, but they are more than just theories. McGregor had articulated the basic assumptions of the organizational behavior perspective.

“The Human Side of Enterprise” is a cogent statement of the basic assumptions of the organizational behavior perspective. Theory X and Theory Y are contrasting basic managerial assumptions about employees that, in McGregor’s words, become self-fulfi lling prophecies. Managerial assumptions cause employee behavior. Theory X and Theory Y are ways of seeing and thinking about people that, in turn, affect their behavior. Thus, “The Human Side of Enterprise” (1957b), which is reprinted in this chapter, is a landmark theory of motivation.

Theory X assumptions represent a restatement of the tenets of the scientifi c manage-ment movement. For example, Theory X holds that human beings inherently dislike work and will avoid it if possible. Most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, or threatened with punishment to get them to work toward the achievement of organizational objectives; in addition, humans prefer to be directed and to avoid responsibility, and will seek security above all else. These assumptions serve as polar opposites to McGregor’s Theory Y.

Theory Y assumptions postulate, for example, that people do not inherently dislike work; work can be a source of satisfaction. People will exercise self-direction and self-control if they are committed to organization objectives. People are willing to seek and to accept responsibility; avoidance of responsibility is not natural—it is a consequence of experiences. The intellectual potential of most humans is only partially utilized at work.

Irving Janis’ 1971 article “Groupthink” is a study of pressures for conformance—the reasons that social conformity is encountered so frequently in groups. Janis examines high-level decision makers and decision making during times of major fi ascoes: the 1962 Bay of Pigs, the Johnson administration’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War, and the 1941 failure to prepare for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Groupthink is “the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action . . . the desperate



drive for consensus at any cost that suppresses dissent among the mighty in the corridors of power.” Janis identifi es eight symptoms of groupthink that are relatively easy to observe:

an illusion of invulnerability;• collective construction of rationalizations that permit group members to ignore warnings or • other forms of negative feedback;unquestioning belief in the morality of the in-group;• strong, negative, stereotyped views about the leaders of enemy groups;• rapid application of pressure against group members who express even momentary doubts • about virtually any illusions the group shares;careful, conscious, personal avoidance of deviation from what appears to be a group • consensus;shared illusions of unanimity of opinion; and• establishment of • mindguards—people who “protect the leader and fellow members from adverse information that might break the complacency they shared about the effectiveness and morality of past decisions.”

Janis concludes with an assessment of the negative infl uence of groupthink on execu-tive decision making (including overestimation of the group’s capability and self-imposed isolation from new or opposing information and points of view), as well as preventive and remedial steps for dealing with groupthink.

The organizational behavior perspective is the most optimistic of all perspectives or schools of organization theory. Building from Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y assumptions, organizational behavior has assumed that under the right circumstances, people and organizations will grow and prosper together. The ultimate worth of people is an over-arching value of the human relations movement, a worthy end in and of itself—not simply a means or process for achieving a higher-order organizational end. Individuals and organ-izations are not necessarily antagonists. Managers can learn to unleash previously stifl ed energies and creativity. The beliefs, values, and tenets of organizational behavior are noble, uplifting, and exciting. They hold a promise for humankind, especially those who will spend their lives working in organizations.

As one would expect of a very optimistic and humanistic set of assumptions and values, they (and the strategies of organizational behavior) became strongly normative (prescriptive). For many organizational behavior practitioners especially in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, this perspective’s assumptions and methods became a cause. Hopefully, through the choice of articles and the introductions to each chapter, this volume commu-nicates these optimistic tenets and values and articulates the logical and emotional reasons why the organizational behavior perspective developed into a movement. This is the true essence of organizational behavior.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alderfer, J. S. (1969). An empirical test of a new theory of human needs. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 4, 142–175.

Argyris, C. (1962). Interpersonal competence and organizational effectiveness. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press and Richard D. Irwin.

Argyris, C. (1970). Intervention theory and method. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.



Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Bennis, W. G. (1989). Why leaders can’t lead: The unconscious conspiracy continues. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bennis, W. G. (2000). Managing the dream: Refl ections on leadership and change. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.

Blanchard, K., & T. Waghorn (1997). Mission possible: Becoming a world-class organization while there’s still time. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Bolman, L. G., & T. E. Deal (2003). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership, 3rd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bolman, L. G., & T. E. Deal (2006). The wizard and the warrior: Leading with passion and power. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Bushe, G. R. (1995). Advances in Appreciative Inquiry as an organization development interven-tion. Organization Development Journal, 13(3), 14–22.

Chemers, M. M. (2002). Effi cacy and effectiveness: Integrating models of leadership and intelli-gence. In R. E. Riggio, S. E. Murphy, & F. J. Pirozzlo, eds., Multiple intelligences and leadership. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Cohen, A. R., & D. L. Bradford (2005). Infl uence without authority. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.Cohen, A. R., & S. L. Fink (2003). Effective behavior in organizations, 7th ed. Hoboken, NJ:

McGraw-Hill/Irwin.Cooperrider, D. L., & D. Whitney. (2005). Appreciative inquiry: A positive revolution in change.

San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.Cox, T. H., Jr. (1993). Cultural diversity in organizations: Theory, research, and practice. San Francisco:

Berrett-Koehler.Follett, M. P. (1926). The giving of orders. In H. C. Metcalf, ed., Scientifi c foundations of business

administration. Baltimore, MD: Williams & Wilkins.French, W. L., & C. H. Bell Jr. (1995). Organization development: Behavioral science interventions for

organization improvement, 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Haire, M. (1954). Industrial social psychology. In G. Lindzey, ed., Handbook of social psychology,

vol. 2: Special fi elds and applications (pp. 1104–1123). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Hersey, P., & K. H. Blanchard (1982). Management of organizational behavior: Utilizing human

resources, 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Janis, I. L. (1971). Groupthink. Psychology Today 5, 44–76.Kearney, R. C., & S. W. Hays (1998). Reinventing government, the new public management and

civil service systems in international perspective: The danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 18(4), 38–54.

Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science: Social equilibrium and social change. Human Relations, 1, 5–41.

Lewin, K. (1948). Resolving social confl icts. New York: Harper.Lipnack, J., & J. Stamps (1999). Virtual teams: The new way to work. Strategy & Leadership, 27,

14–19.Locke, E. A. (2001). Self-set goals and self-effi cacy as mediators of incentives and personality. In

M. Erez, U. Kleinbeck, & H. Thierry, eds., Work motivation in the context of a globalizing economy. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370–396.Mayo, G. E. (1933). The human problems of an industrial civilization. Boston, MA: Harvard Business

School, Division of Research.McGregor, D. M. (1957a). The human side of enterprise. Address to the fi fth anniversary convo-

cation of the School of Industrial Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In Adventure in thought and action. Cambridge, MA: MIT School of Industrial Management, 1957.



Reprinted in W. G. Bennis, E. H. Schein, & C. McGregor, eds. (1966). Leadership and motiva-tion: Essays of Douglas McGregor (pp. 3–20). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

McGregor, D. M. (1957b). The human side of enterprise. Management Review, 46, 22–28, 88–92.McGregor, D. M. (1960). The human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill.Münsterberg, H. (1913). Psychology and industrial effi ciency. Boston, MA: Houghton Miffl in.Münsterberg, M. (1922). Hugo Münsterberg: His life and work. New York: Appleton.Northouse, P. G. (1997). Leadership: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Ott, J. S., S. J. Parkes, & R. B. Simpson, eds. (2008). Classic readings in organizational behavior, 4th

ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson.Pascale, R. T. (2001). Laws of the jungle and the new laws of business. Leader to Leader, 20, 21–35.Porter, L. W., E. E. Lawler III, & J. R. Hackman (1975). Behavior in organizations (pp. 403–422).

New York: McGraw-Hill.Roethlisberger, F. J. (1941). Management and morale. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Schermerhorn, J., J. G. Hunt, & R. N. Osborn (2008). Organizational behavior, 10th ed. New York:

John Wiley.Roethlisberger, F. J., & W. J. Dickson (1939). Management and the worker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Victor, B., & C. Stephens (1994, November). The dark side of the new organizational forms.

Organization Science, 5, 479–482.Wheatley, M. (2000). Leadership and the new science. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.Wheelan, S. A. (2005). Creating effective teams: A guide for members and leaders, 2nd ed. Thousand

Oaks, CA: Sage.Wren, D. A. (1972). The evolution of management thought. New York: Ronald Press.Wright, B. E. (2004). The role of work context in work motivation: A public sector application of goal

and social cognitive theories. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 14, 59–78.


156

Scientifi c Foundations of Business Administration, ed. Henry C. Metcalf (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1926). © 1926 by The Williams & Wilkins Co.

To some men the matter of giving orders seems a very simple affair; they expect to issue their own orders and have them obeyed without question. Yet, on the other hand, the shrewd common sense of many a business executive has shown him that the issuing of orders is surrounded by many diffi culties; that to demand an unquestion-ing obedience to orders not approved, not perhaps even understood, is bad business policy. Moreover, psychology, as well as our own observation, shows us not only that you cannot get people to do things most satisfactorily by ordering them or exhorting them; but also that even rea-soning with them, even convincing them intellectually, may not be enough. Even the “consent of the governed” will not do all the work it is supposed to do, an important consideration for those who are advocating employee representation. For all our past life, our early training, our later experience, all our emotions, beliefs, prejudices, every desire that we have, have formed certain habits of mind that the psychologists call habit-patterns, action-patterns, motor-sets.

Therefore it will do little good merely to get intellectual agreement; unless you change the habit-patterns of people, you have not really changed your people. . . .

If we analyse this matter a little further we shall see that we have to do three things. I am now going to use psychologi-cal language: (1) build up certain attitudes; (2) provide for the release of these atti-tudes; (3) augment the released response as it is being carried out. What does this mean in the language of business? A psychologist has given us the example of the salesman.

The salesman fi rst creates in you the atti-tude that you want his article; then, at just the “psychological” moment, he produces his contract blank which you may sign and thus release that attitude; then if, as you’re preparing to sign, some one comes in and tells you how pleased he has been with his purchase of this article, that augments the response which is being released.

If we apply this to the subject of orders and obedience, we see that people can obey an order only if previous habit patterns are appealed to or new ones created. . . .

This is an important consideration for us, for from one point of view business success depends largely on this—namely, whether our business is so organized and administered that it tends to form certain habits, certain mental attitudes. It has been hard for many old-fashioned employers to understand that orders will not take the place of training. I want to italicize that. Many a time an employer has been angry because, as he expressed it, a workman “wouldn’t” do so and so, when the truth of the matter was that the workman couldn’t, actually couldn’t, do as ordered because he could not go contrary to life-long habits. This whole subject might be taken up under the heading of education, for there we could give many instances of the attempt to make arbitrary authority take the place of training. In history, the aftermath of all revolutions shows us the results of the lack of training.

. . . A boy may respond differently to the same suggestion when made by his teacher and when made by his schoolmate. Moreover, he may respond differently to the same suggestion made by the teacher in the

14The Giving of OrdersMary Parker Follett


The Giving of Orders 157

schoolroom and made by the teacher when they are taking a walk together. Applying this to the giving of orders, we see that the place in which orders are given, the cir-cumstances under which they are given, may make all the difference in the world as to the response which we get. Hand them down a long way from President or Works Manager and the effect is weakened. One might say that the strength of favorable response to an order is in inverse ratio to the distance the order travels. Production effi -ciency is always in danger of being affected whenever the long-distance order is substi-tuted for the face-to-face suggestion. There is, however, another reason for that which I shall consider in a moment.

. . . I should say that the giving of orders and the receiving of orders ought to be a matter of integration through circular behavior, and that we should seek methods to bring this about.

Psychology has another important con-tribution to make on this subject of issuing orders or giving directions: before the inte-gration can be made between order-giver and order-receiver, there is often an integra-tion to be made within one or both of the individuals concerned. There are often two dissociated paths in the individual; if you are clever enough to recognize these, you can sometimes forestall a Freudian confl ict, make the integration appear before there is an acute stage. . . .

Business administration has often to con-sider how to deal with the dissociated paths in individuals or groups, but the methods of doing this successfully have been developed much further in some departments than in others. We have as yet hardly recognized this as part of the technique of dealing with employees, yet the clever salesman knows that it is the chief part of his job. The prospective buyer wants the article and does not want it. The able salesman does not suppress the arguments in the mind of the purchaser against buying, for then the purchaser might be sorry afterwards for his purchase, and that would not be good sales-manship. Unless he can unite, integrate, in

the purchaser’s mind, the reasons for buying and the reasons for not buying, his future sales will be imperilled, he will not be the highest grade salesman.

Please note that this goes beyond what the psychologist whom I quoted at the beginning of this section told us. He said, “The salesman must create in you the atti-tude that you want his article.” Yes, but only if he creates this attitude by integration, not by suppression.

Apply all this to orders. An order often leaves the individual to whom it is given with two dissociated paths; an order should seek to unite, to integrate, dissociated paths. Court decisions often settle arbi-trarily which of two ways is to be followed without showing a possible integration of the two, that is, the individual is often left with an internal confl ict on his hands. This is what both courts and business adminis-tration should try to prevent, the internal confl icts of individuals or groups.

. . . Probably more industrial trouble has been caused by the manner in which orders are given than in any other way. In the Report on Strikes and Lockout, a British Government publication, the cause of a number of strikes is given as “alleged harassing conduct of the foreman,” “alleged tyrannical conduct of an under-foreman,” “alleged overbearing con-duct of offi cials.” The explicit statement, however, of the tyranny of superior offi -cers as the direct cause of strikes is I should say, unusual, yet resentment smoulders and breaks out in other issues. And the demand for better treatment is often explicit enough. We fi nd it made by the metal and wood-working trades in an aircraft factory, who declared that any treatment of men without regard to their feelings of self-respect would be answered by a stoppage of work. We fi nd it put in certain agreements with employers that “the men must be treated with proper respect, and threats and abusive language must not be used.”

What happens to [a] man, in a man, when an order is given in a disagreeable manner by his foreman, head of department, his imme-diate superior in store, bank or factory? The



man addressed feels that his self-respect is attacked, that one of his most inner sanc-tuaries is invaded. He loses his temper or becomes sullen or is on the defensive; he begins thinking of his “rights”—a fatal atti-tude for any of us. In the language we have been using, the wrong behavior pattern is aroused, the wrong motor-set; that is, he is now “set” to act in a way which is not going to benefi t the enterprise in which he is engaged.

There is a more subtle psychological point here, too; the more you are “bossed” the more your activity of thought will take place within the bossing-pattern, and your part in that pattern seems usually to be opposition to the bossing.

This complaint of the abusive language and the tyrannical treatment of the one just above the worker is an old story to us all, but there is an opposite extreme which is far too little considered. The immediate supe-rior offi cer is often so close to the worker that he does not exercise the proper duties of his position. Far from taking on himself an aggressive authority, he has often evaded one of the chief problems of his job: how to do what is implied in the fact that he has been put in a position over others. . . .

Now what is our problem here? How can we avoid the two extremes: too great bossism in giving orders, and practically no orders given? I am going to ask how you are avoiding these extremes. My solution is to depersonalize the giving of orders, to unite all concerned in a study of the situation, to discover the law of the situation and obey that. Until we do this I do not think we shall have the most successful business adminis-tration. This is what does take place, what has to take place, when there is a question between two men in positions of equal authority. The head of the sales depart-ments does not give orders to the head of the production department, or vice versa. Each studies the market and the fi nal deci-sion is made as the market demands. This is, ideally, what should take place between foremen and the rank and fi le, between any head and his subordinates. One person

should not give orders to another person, but both should agree to take their orders from the situation. If orders are simply part of the situation, the question of someone giving and someone receiving does not come up. Both accept the orders given by the situa-tion. Employers accept the orders given by the situation; employees accept the orders given by the situation. This gives, does it not, a slightly different aspect to the whole of business administration through the entire plant?

We have here, I think, one of the larg-est contributions of scientifi c management: it tends to depersonalize orders. From one point of view, one might call the essence of scientifi c management the attempt to fi nd the law of the situation. With scientifi c management the managers are as much under orders as the workers, for both obey the law of the situation. Our job is not how to get people to obey orders, but how to devise methods by which we can best dis-cover the order integral to a particular situa-tion. When that is found, the employee can issue it to the employer, as well as employer to employee. This often happens easily and naturally. My cook or my stenographer point out the law of the situation, and I, if I rec-ognize it as such, accept it, even although it may reverse some “order” I have given.

If those in supervisory positions should depersonalize orders, then there would be no overbearing authority on the one hand, nor on the other that dangerous laissez-aller which comes from the fear of exercising authority. Of course we should exercise authority, but always the authority of the situation. I do not say that we have found the way to a frictionless existence, far from it, but we now understand the place which we mean to give to friction. We intend to set it to work for us as the engineer does when he puts the belt over the pulley. There will be just as much, probably more, room for disagreement in the method I am advocat-ing. The situation will often be seen differ-ently, often be interpreted differently. But we shall know what to do with it, we shall have found a method of dealing with it.



I call it depersonalizing because there is no time to go any further into the matter. I think it really is a matter of repersonalizing. We, persons, have relations with each other, but we should fi nd them in and through the whole situation. We cannot have any sound relations with each other as long as we take them out of that setting which gives them their meaning and value. This divorcing of persons and the situation does a great deal of harm. I have just said that scientifi c manage-ment depersonalizes; the deeper philosophy of scientifi c management shows us personal relations within the whole setting of that thing of which they are a part. . . .

I said above that we should substitute for the long-distance order the face-to-face suggestion. I think we can now see a more cogent reason for this than the one then given. It is not the face-to-face suggestion that we want so much as the joint study of the problem, and such joint study can be made best by the employee and his immedi-ate superior or employee and special expert on that question.

I began this talk by emphasizing the advisability of preparing in advance the attitude necessary for the carrying out of orders, and in the previous paper we consid-ered preparing the attitude for integration; but we have now, in our consideration of the joint study of situations, in our empha-sis on obeying the law of the situation, perhaps got a little beyond that, or rather we have now to consider in what sense we wish to take the psychologist’s doctrine of prepared-in-advance attitudes. . . .

We should not try to create the attitude we want, although that is the usual phrase, but the attitude required for cooperative study and decision. This holds good even for the salesman. We said above that when the salesman is told that he should create in the prospective buyer the attitude that he wants the article, he ought also to be told that he should do this by integration rather than by suppression. We have now a hint of how he is to attain this integration.

I have spoken of the importance of changing some of the language of business

personnel relations. We considered whether the words “grievances,” “complaints,” or Ford’s “trouble specialists” did not arouse the wrong behavior-patterns. I think “order” certainly does. If that word is not to mean any longer external authority, arbi-trary authority, but the law of the situation, then we need a new word for it. It is often the order that people resent as much as the thing ordered. People do not like to be ordered even to take a holiday. I have often seen instances of this. The wish to gov-ern one’s own life is, of course, one of the most fundamental feelings in every human being. To call this “the instinct of self-asser-tion,” “the instinct of initiative,” does not express it wholly. I think it is told in the life of some famous American that when he was a boy and his mother said, “Go get a pail of water,” he always replied, “I won’t,” before taking up the pail and fetching the water. This is signifi cant; he resented the command, the command of a person; but he went and got the water, not, I believe, because he had to, but because he recog-nized the demand of the situation. That, he knew he had to obey; that, he was willing to obey. And this kind of obedience is not opposed to the wish to govern one’s self, but each is involved in the other; both are part of the same fundamental urge at the root of one’s being. We have here something far more profound than “the egoistic impulse” or “the instinct of self-assertion.” We have the very essence of the human being.

This subject of orders has led us into the heart of the whole question of authority and consent. When we conceive of authority and consent as parts of an inclusive situa-tion, does that not throw a fl ood of light on this question? The point of view here pre-sented gets rid of several dilemmas which have seemed to puzzle people in dealing with consent. The feeling of being “under” someone, of “subordination,” of “servility,” of being “at the will of another,” comes out again and again in the shop stewards movement and in the testimony before the Coal Commission. One man said before the Coal Commission, “It is all right to



work with anyone; what is disagreeable is to feel too distinctly that you are working under anyone.” With is a pretty good prepo-sition, not because it connotes democracy, but because it connotes functional unity, a much more profound conception than that of democracy as usually held. The study of the situation involves the with preposition. Then Sadie is not left alone by the head of the cloak department, nor does she have to obey her. The head of the department says, “Let’s see how such cases had better be han-dled, then we’ll abide by that.” Sadie is not under the head of the department, but both are under the situation.

Twice I have had a servant applying for a place ask me if she would be treated as a menial. When the fi rst woman asked me that, I had no idea what she meant, I thought perhaps she did not want to do the roughest work, but later I came to the con-clusion that to be treated as a menial meant to be obliged to be under someone, to fol-low orders without using one’s own judg-ment. If we believe that what heightens self-respect increases effi ciency, we shall be on our guard here.

Very closely connected with this is the matter of pride in one’s work. If an order goes against what the craftsman or the clerk thinks is the way of doing his work which will bring the best results, he is justifi ed in not wishing to obey that order. Could not that diffi culty be met by a joint study of the situation? It is said that it is characteristic of the British workman to feel, “I know my job and won’t be told how.” The peculiarities of the British workman might be met by a joint study of the situation, it being under-stood that he probably has more to contrib-ute to that study than anyone else. . . .

There is another dilemma which has to be met by everyone who is in what is called a position of authority: how can you expect people merely to obey orders and at the same time to take that degree of responsi-bility which they should take? Indeed, in my experience, the people who enjoy fol-lowing orders blindly, without any thought on their own part, are those who like thus

to get rid of responsibility. But the taking of responsibility, each according to his capacity, each according to his function in the whole . . . , this taking of responsibility is usually the most vital matter in the life of every human being, just as the allotting of responsibility is the most important part of business administration.

A young trade unionist said to me, “how much dignity can I have as a mere employee?” He can have all the dignity in the world if he is allowed to make his full-est contribution to the plant and to assume defi nitely the responsibility therefor.

I think one of the gravest problems before us is how to make the reconcilia-tion between receiving orders and taking responsibility. And I think the reconcilia-tion can be made through our conception of the law of the situation. . . .

We have considered the subject of sym-bols. It is often very apparent that an order is a symbol. The referee in the game stands watch in hand and says, “Go.” It is an order, but order only as symbol. I may say to an employee, “Do so and so,” but I should say it only because we have both agreed, openly or tacitly, that that which I am ordering done is the best thing to be done. The order is then a symbol. And if it is a philosophical and psychological truth that we owe obedi-ence only to a functional unity to which we are contributing, we should remember that a more accurate way of stating that would be to say that our obligation is to a unifying, to a process.

This brings us now to one of our most serious problems in this matter of orders. It is important, but we can touch on it only briefl y; it is what we spoke of . . . as the evolving situation. I am trying to show here that the order must be integral to the situ-ation and must be recognized as such. But we saw that the situation was always devel-oping. If the situation is never stationary, then the order should never be stationary, so to speak; how to prevent it from being so is our problem. The situation is chang-ing while orders are being carried out. How is the order to keep up with the situation?



External orders never can, only those drawn fresh from the situation.

Moreover, if taking a responsible attitude toward experience involves recognizing the evolving situation, a conscious attitude toward experience means that we note the change which the developing situation makes in ourselves; the situation does not change without changing us.

. . . When I asked a very intelligent girl what she thought would be the result of profi t sharing and employee representa-tion in the factory where she worked, she replied joyfully, “We shan’t need foremen any more.” While her entire ignoring of the fact that the foreman has other duties than keeping workers on their jobs was amusing, one wants to go beyond one’s amusement and fi nd out what this objection to being watched really means. . . .

I have seen similar instances cited. Many workmen feel that being watched is unbear-able. What can we do about it? How can we get proper supervision without this watching which a worker resents? Supervision is nec-essary; supervision is resented—how are we going to make the integration there? Some say, “Let the workers elect the supervisors.” I do not believe in that.

There are three other points closely con-nected with the subject of this paper which I should like merely to point out. First, when and how do you point out mistakes, misconduct? One principle can surely guide us here: don’t blame for the sake of blam-ing, make what you have to say accomplish something; say it in that form, at that time, under those circumstances, which will make

it a real education to your subordinate. Secondly, since it is recognized that the one who gives the orders is not as a rule a very popular person, the management sometimes tries to offset this by allowing the person who has this onus upon him to give any pleasant news to the workers, to have the credit of any innovation which the workers very much desire. One man-ager told me that he always tried to do this. I suppose that this is good behavioristic psychology, and yet I am not sure that it is a method I wholly like. It is quite different, however, in the case of a mistaken order having been given; then I think the one who made the mistake should certainly be the one to rectify it, not as a matter of strat-egy, but because it is better for him too. It is better for all of us not only to acknowledge our mistakes, but to do something about them. If a foreman discharges someone and it is decided to reinstate the man, it is obviously not only good tactics but a square deal to the foreman to allow him to do the reinstating.

There is, of course, a great deal more to this matter of giving orders than we have been able to touch on; far from exhausting the subject, I feel that I have only given hints. I have been told that the artillery men suffered more mentally in the war than others, and the reason assigned for this was that their work was directed from a distance. The combination of numbers by which they focused their fi re was telephoned to them. The result was also at a distance. Their activity was not closely enough connected with the actual situation at either end.


162

Reprinted by permission of the publisher from “The Hawthorne Experiments” in Management and Morale by F.J. Roethlisberger, pp. 7–26, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1941 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Copyright © renewed 1969 by F.J. Roethlisberger.

There seems to be an assumption today that we need a complex set of ideas to handle the complex problems of this complex world in which we live. We assume that a big problem needs a big idea; a complex problem needs a complex idea for its solution. As a result, our thinking tends to become more and more tor-tuous and muddled. Nowhere is this more true than in matters of human behavior. It seems to me that the road back to sanity—and here is where my title comes in—lies

(1) In having a few simple and clear ideas about the world in which we live.

(2) In complicating our ideas, not in a vacuum, but only in reference to things we can observe, see, feel, hear, and touch. Let us not generalize from verbal defi nitions; let us know in fact what we are talking about.

(3) In having a very simple method by means of which we can explore our complex world. We need a tool which will allow us to get the data from which our gen-eralizations are to be drawn. We need a simple skill to keep us in touch with what is sometimes referred to as “reality.”

(4) In being “tough-minded,” i.e., in not let-ting ourselves be too disappointed because the complex world never quite fulfi lls our most cherished expectations of it. Let us remember that the concrete phenomena will always elude any set of abstractions that we can make of them.

(5) In knowing very clearly the class of phe-nomena to which our ideas and methods relate. Now, this is merely a way of saying, “Do not use a saw as a hammer.” A saw is a useful tool precisely because it is limited and designed for a certain purpose. Do not criticize the usefulness of a saw because it does not make a good hammer.

It is my simple thesis that a human prob-lem requires a human solution. First, we have to learn to recognize a human prob-lem when we see one; and, second, upon recognizing it, we have to learn to deal with it as such and not as if it were something else. Too often at the verbal level we talk glibly about the importance of the human factor; and too seldom at the concrete level of behavior do we recognize a human prob-lem for what it is and deal with it as such. A human problem to be brought to a human solution requires human data and human tools. It is my purpose to use the Western Electric researches as an illustration of what I mean by this statement, because, if they deserve the publicity and acclaim which they have received, it is because, in my opinion, they have so conclusively demonstrated this point. In this sense they are the road back to sanity in management-employee relations.

EXPERIMENTS IN ILLUMINATION

The Western Electric researches started about sixteen years ago, in the Hawthorne plant, with a series of experiments on illu-mination. The purpose was to fi nd out the relation of the quality and quantity of illumination to the effi ciency of industrial workers. These studies lasted several years, and I shall not describe them in detail. It will suffi ce to point out that the results were quite different from what had been expected.

In one experiment the workers were divided into two groups. One group, called

15The Hawthorne ExperimentsFritz J. Roethlisberger


The Hawthorne Experiments 163

the “test group,” was to work under different illumination intensities. The other group, called the “control group,” was to work under an intensity of illumination as nearly constant as possible. During the fi rst exper-iment, the test group was submitted to three different intensities of illumination of increasing magnitude, 24, 46, and 70 foot candles. What were the results of this early experiment? Production increased in both rooms—in both the test group and the control group—and the rise in output was roughly of the same magnitude in both cases.

In another experiment, the light under which the test group worked was decreased from 10 to 3 foot candles, while the con-trol group worked, as before, under a con-stant level of illumination intensity. In this case the output rate in the test group went up instead of down. It also went up in the control group.

In still another experiment, the workers were allowed to believe that the illumina-tion was being increased, although, in fact, no change in intensity was made. The work-ers commented favorably on the improved lighting condition, but there was no appre-ciable change in output. At another time, the workers were allowed to believe that the intensity of illumination was being decreased, although again, in fact, no actual change was made. The workers complained somewhat about the poorer lighting, but again there was no appreciable effect on output.

And fi nally, in another experiment, the intensity of illumination was decreased to .06 of a foot candle, which is the intensity of illumination approximately equivalent to that of ordinary moonlight. Not until this point was reached was there any appre-ciable decline in the output rate.

What did the experimenters learn? Obviously, as Stuart Chase said, there was something “screwy,” but the experiment-ers were not quite sure who or what was screwy—they themselves, the subjects, or the results. One thing was clear: the results were negative. Nothing of a positive nature

had been learned about the relation of illumination to industrial effi ciency. If the results were to be taken at their face value, it would appear that there was no relation between illumination and industrial effi -ciency. However, the investigators were not yet quite willing to draw this conclu-sion. They realized the diffi culty of testing for the effect of a single variable in a situ-ation where there were many uncontrolled variables. It was thought therefore that another experiment should be devised in which other variables affecting the output of workers could be better controlled.

A few of the tough-minded experiment-ers already were beginning to suspect their basic ideas and assumptions with regard to human motivation. It occurred to them that the trouble was not so much with the results or with the subjects as it was with their notion regarding the way their subjects were supposed to behave—the notion of a simple cause-and-effect, direct relationship between certain physical changes in the workers’ envi-ronment and the responses of the workers to these changes. Such a notion completely ignored the human meaning of these changes to the people who were subjected to them.

In the illumination experiments, there-fore, we have a classic example of trying to deal with a human situation in nonhuman terms. The experimenters had obtained no human data; they had been handling elec-tric-light bulbs and plotting average output curves. Hence their results had no human signifi cance. That is why they seemed screwy. Let me suggest here, however, that the results were not screwy, but the experi-menters were—a “screwy” person being by defi nition one who is not acting in accor-dance with the customary human values of the situation in which he fi nds himself.

THE RELAY ASSEMBLY TEST ROOM

Another experiment was framed, in which it was planned to submit a segregated group of workers to different kinds of working conditions. The idea was very simple: A



group of fi ve girls were placed in a separate room where their conditions of work could be carefully controlled, where their output could be measured, and where they could be closely observed. It was decided to intro-duce at specifi ed intervals different changes in working conditions and to see what effect these innovations had on output. . . . Under these conditions of close observation the girls were studied for a period of fi ve years. Literally tons of material were collected. Probably nowhere in the world has so much material been collected about a small group of workers for such a long period of time.

But what about the results? They can be stated very briefl y. When all is said and done, they amount roughly to this: A skill-ful statistician spent several years trying to relate variations in output with variations in the physical circumstances of these fi ve operators. . . . The attempt to relate changes in physical circumstances to variations in output resulted in not a single correlation of enough statistical signifi cance to be recognized by any competent statistician as having any meaning.

Now, of course, it would be mislead-ing to say that this negative result was the only conclusion reached. There were positive conclusions, and it did not take the experimenters more than two years to fi nd out that they had missed the boat. After two years of work, certain things hap-pened which made them sit up and take notice. Different experimental conditions of work, in the nature of changes in the number and duration of rest pauses and differences in the length of the working day and week, had been introduced in this Relay Assembly Test Room. For example, the investigators fi rst introduced two fi ve-minute rests, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Then they increased the length of these rests, and after that they introduced the rests at different times of the day. During one experimental period they served the operators a specially prepared lunch during the rest. In the later periods, they decreased the length of the working day by one-half hour and then by one hour.

They gave the operators Saturday morning off for a while. Altogether, thirteen such periods of different working conditions were introduced in the fi rst two years.

During the fi rst year and a half of the experiment, everybody was happy, both the investigators and the operators. The inves-tigators were happy because as conditions of work improved the output rate rose steadily. Here, it appeared, was strong evidence in favor of their preconceived hypothesis that fatigue was the major factor limiting output. The operators were happy because their conditions of work were being improved, they were earning more money, and they were objects of considerable attention from top management. But then one investiga-tor—one of those tough-minded fellows—suggested that they restore the original conditions of work, that is, go back to a full forty-eight-hour week without rests, lunches and what not. This was Period XII. Then the happy state of affairs, when everything was going along as it theoretically should, went sour. Output, instead of taking the expected nose dive, maintained its high level.

Again the investigators were forcibly reminded that human situations are likely to be complex. In any human situation, whenever a simple change is introduced—a rest pause, for example—other changes, unwanted and unanticipated, may also be brought about. What I am saying here is very simple. If one experiments on a stone, the stone does not know it is being experi-mented upon—all of which makes it simple for people experimenting on stones. But if a human being is being experimented upon, he is likely to know it. Therefore, his atti-tudes toward the experiment and toward the experimenters become very important factors in determining his responses to the situation.

Now that is what happened in the Relay Assembly Test Room. To the investigators, it was essential that the workers give their full and whole-hearted coöperation to the experiment. They did not want the opera-tors to work harder or easier depending upon their attitude toward the conditions that



were imposed. They wanted them to work as they felt, so that they could be sure that the different physical conditions of work were solely responsible for the variations in out-put. For each of the experimental changes, they wanted subjects whose responses would be uninfl uenced by so-called “psychological factors.”

In order to bring this about, the investiga-tors did everything in their power to secure the complete coöperation of their subjects, with the result that almost all the practices common to the shop were altered. The oper-ators were consulted about the changes to be made, and, indeed, several plans were abandoned because they met with the dis-approval of the girls. They were questioned sympathetically about their reactions to the conditions imposed, and many of these conferences took place in the offi ce of the superintendent. The girls were allowed to talk at work; their “bogey” was eliminated. Their physical health and well-being be-came matters of great concern. Their opin-ions, hopes, and fears were eagerly sought. What happened was that in the very pro-cess of setting the conditions for the test—a so-called “controlled” experiment—the experi-menters had completely altered the social situation of the room. Inadvertently a change had been introduced which was far more important than the planned experi-mental innovations: the customary supervi-sion in the room had been revolutionized. This accounted for the better attitudes of the girls and their improved rate of work.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW AND MORE FRUITFUL POINT OF VIEW

After Period XII in the Relay Assembly Test Room, the investigators decided to change their ideas radically. What all their experiments had dramatically and conclu-sively demonstrated was the importance of employee attitudes and sentiments. It was clear that the responses of workers to what was happening about them were dependent

upon the signifi cance these events had for them. In most work situations the meaning of a change is likely to be as important, if not more so, than the change itself. This was the great éclaircissement, the new illu-mination, that came from the research. It was an illumination quite different from what they had expected from the illumi-nation studies. Curiously enough, this dis-covery is nothing very new or startling. It is something which anyone who has had some concrete experience in handling other people intuitively recognizes and practices. Whether or not a person is going to give his services whole-heartedly to a group depends, in good part, on the way he feels about his job, his fellow workers, and supervisors—the meaning for him of what is happening about him.

However, when the experimenters began to tackle the problem of employee atti-tudes and the factors determining such attitudes—when they began to tackle the problem of “meaning”—they entered a sort of twilight zone where things are never quite what they seem. Moreover, overnight, as it were, they were robbed of all the tools they had so carefully forged; for all their previous tools were nonhuman tools concerned with the measurement of output, temperature, humidity, etc., and these were no longer useful for the human data that they now wanted to obtain. What the experiment-ers now wanted to know was how a person felt, what his intimate thinking, refl ections, and preoccupations were, and what he liked and disliked about his work environment. In short, what did the whole blooming business—his job, his supervision, his work-ing conditions—mean to him? Now this was human stuff, and there were no tools, or at least the experimenters knew of none, for obtaining and evaluating this kind of material.

Fortunately, there were a few courageous souls among the experimenters. These men were not metaphysicians, psychologists, academicians, professors, intellectuals, or what have you. They were men of common sense and of practical affairs. They were not



driven by any great heroic desire to change the world. They were true experimenters, that is, men compelled to follow the impli-cations of their own monkey business. All the evidence of their studies was pointing in one direction. Would they take the jump? They did.

EXPERIMENTS IN INTERVIEWING WORKERS

A few tough-minded experimenters decided to go into the shops and—completely dis-armed and denuded of their elaborate logical equipment and in all humility—to see if they could learn how to get the workers to talk about things that were important to them and could learn to understand what the workers were trying to tell them. This was a revolutionary idea in the year 1928, when this interviewing program started—the idea of getting a worker to talk to you and to listen sympathetically, but intelligently, to what he had to say. In that year a new era of personnel relations began. It was the fi rst real attempt to get human data and to forge human tools to get them. In that year a novel idea was born; dimly the experimenters perceived a new method of human control. In that year the Rubicon was crossed from which there could be no return to the “good old days.” Not that the experimenters ever wanted to return, because they now entered a world so exciting, so intriguing, and so full of promise that it made the “good old days” seem like the prattle and play of children.

When these experimenters decided to enter the world of “meaning,” with very few tools, but with a strong sense of curiosity and a willingness to learn, they had many interesting adventures. It would be too long a story to tell all of them, or even a small part of them. They made plenty of mistakes, but they were not afraid to learn.

At fi rst, they found it diffi cult to learn to give full and complete attention to what a person had to say without interrupting him before he was through. They found it dif-fi cult to learn not to give advice, not to

make or imply moral judgments about the speaker, not to argue, not to be too clever, not to dominate the conversation, not to ask leading questions. They found it diffi -cult to get the person to talk about matters which were important to him and not to the interviewer. But, most important of all, they found it diffi cult to learn that perhaps the thing most signifi cant to a person was not something in his immediate work situation.

Gradually, however, they learned these things. They discovered that sooner or later a person tends to talk about what is uppermost in his mind to a sympathetic and skillful listener, and they became more pro-fi cient in interpreting what a person is say-ing or trying to say. Of course they protected the confi dences given to them and made absolutely sure that nothing an employee said could ever be used against him. Slowly they began to forge a simple human tool—imperfect, to be sure—to get the kind of data they wanted. They called this method “interviewing.” I would hesitate to say the number of man-hours of labor which went into the forging of this tool. There followed from studies made through its use a gradu-ally changing conception of the worker and his behavior.

A NEW WAY OF VIEWING EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION AND DISSATISFACTION

When the experimenters started to study employee likes and dislikes, they assumed, at fi rst, that they would fi nd a simple and logical relation between a person’s likes or dislikes and certain items and events in his immediate work situation. They expected to fi nd a simple connection, for example, between a person’s complaint and the object about which he was complaining. Hence, the solution would be easy: correct the object of the complaint, if possible, and presto! the complaint would disappear. Unfortunately, however, the world of human behavior is not so simple as this conception of it; and it



took the investigators several arduous and painful years to fi nd this out. I will mention only a few interesting experiences they had.

Several times they changed the objects of the complaint only to fi nd that the attitudes of the complainants remained unchanged. In these cases, correcting the object of the complaint did not remedy the complaint or the attitude of the person expressing it. A certain complaint might disappear, to be sure, only to have another one arise. Here the investigators were running into so-called “chronic kickers,” people whose dissatisfac-tions were more deeply rooted in factors relating to their personal histories. . . .

Several times they did absolutely nothing about the object of the complaint, but after the interview, curiously enough, the com-plaint disappeared. A typical example of this was that of a woman who complained at great length and with considerable feel-ing about the poor food being served in the company restaurant. When, a few days later, she chanced to meet the interviewer, she commented with great enthusiasm upon the improved food and thanked the inter-viewer for communicating her grievance to management and for securing such prompt action. Here no change had been made in the thing criticized; yet the employee felt that something had been done.

Many times they found that people did not really want anything done about the things of which they were complaining. What they did want was an opportunity to talk about their troubles to a sympathetic lis-tener. It was astonishing to fi nd the number of instances in which workers complained about things which had happened many, many years ago, but which they described as vividly as if they had happened just a day before.

Here again, something was “screwy,” but this time the experimenters realized that it was their assumptions which were screwy. They were assuming that the meanings which people assign to their experience are essen-tially logical. They were carrying in their heads the notion of the “economic man,” a

man primarily motivated by economic inter-est, whose logical capacities were being used in the service of this self-interest.

Gradually and painfully in the light of the evidence, which was overwhelm-ing, the experimenters had been forced to abandon this conception of the worker and his behavior. Only with a new work-ing hypothesis could they make sense of the data they had collected. The conception of the worker which they developed is actu-ally nothing very new or startling; it is one which any effective administrator intui-tively recognizes and practices in handling human beings.

First, they found that the behavior of workers could not be understood apart from their feelings or sentiments. I shall use the word “sentiment” hereafter to refer not only to such things as feelings and emotions, but also to a much wider range of phenomena which may not be expressed in violent feelings or emotions—phenomena that are referred to by such words as “loyalty,” “integrity,” “solidarity.”

Secondly, they found that sentiments are easily disguised, and hence are diffi cult to recognize and to study. Manifestations of sentiment take a number of different forms. Feelings of personal integrity, for example, can be expressed by a handshake; they can also be expressed, when violated, by a sit-down strike. Moreover, people like to rationalize their sentiments and to objec-tify them. We are not so likely to say “I feel bad,” as to say “The world is bad.” In other words, we like to endow the world with those attributes and qualities which will justify and account for the feelings and sen-timents we have toward it; we tend to proj-ect our sentiments on the outside world.

Thirdly, they found that manifestations of sentiment could not be understood as things in and by themselves, but only in terms of the total situation of the person. To comprehend why a person felt the way he did, a wider range of phenomena had to be explored. The following three diagrams illustrate roughly the development of this point of view.



It will be remembered that at fi rst the investigators assumed a simple and direct relation between certain physical changes in the worker’s environment and his responses to them. This simple state of mind is illus-trated in diagram I of Figure 15.1. But all the evidence of the early experiments showed that the responses of employees to changes in their immediate working environment can be understood only in terms of their atti-tudes—the “meaning” these changes have for them. This point of view is represented in diagram II of Figure 15.1. However, the “meaning” which these changes have for the worker is not strictly and primarily logi-cal, for they are fraught with human feel-ings and values. The “meaning,” therefore, which any individual worker assigns to a particular change depends upon (1) his social “conditioning,” or what sentiments (values, hopes, fears, expectations, etc.) he is bringing to the work situation because of his previous family and group associa-tions, and hence the relation of the change to these sentiments; and (2) the kind of human satisfactions he is deriving from his social participation with other work-ers and supervisors in the immediate work group of which he is a member, and hence the effect of the change on his customary interpersonal relations. This way of regard-ing the responses of workers (both verbal

and overt) is represented in diagram III of Figure 15.1. It says briefl y: Sentiments do not appear in a vacuum; they do not come out of the blue; they appear in a social con-text. They have to be considered in terms of that context, and apart from it they are likely to be misunderstood.

One further point should be made about that aspect of the worker’s environment designated “Social Situation at Work” in diagram III (Figure 15.1). What is meant is that the worker is not an isolated, atomic individual; he is a member of a group, or of groups. Within each of these groups the individuals have feelings and senti-ments toward each other, which bind them together in collaborative effort. Moreover, these collective sentiments can, and do, become attached to every item and object in the industrial environment—even to output. Material goods, output, wages, hours of work, and so on, cannot be treated as things in themselves. Instead, they must be interpreted as carriers of social value.

OUTPUT AS A FORM OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

That output is a form of social behavior was well illustrated in a study made by the Hawthorne experimenters, called the Bank Wiring Observation Room. This room contained fourteen workmen representing three occupational groups—wiremen, sol-dermen, and inspectors. These men were on group piecework, where the more they turned out the more they earned. In such a situation one might have expected that they would have been interested in main-taining total output and that the faster workers would have put pressure on the slower workers to improve their effi ciency. But this was not the case. Operating within this group were four basic sentiments, which can be expressed briefl y as follows: (1) You should not turn out too much work; if you do, you are a “rate buster.” (2) You should not turn out too little work; if you do, you are a “chiseler.” (3) You should not say

FIGURE 15.1

I. Change Response

II. Change Response

Attitudes (sentiments)

III. Change Response

Attitudes (sentiments)

Personal Social situation history at work



anything to a supervisor which would react to the detriment of one of your associates; if you do, you are a “squealer.” (4) You should not be too offi cious; that is, if you are an inspector you should not act like one.

To be an accepted member of the group a man had to act in accordance with these social standards. One man in this group exceeded the group standard of what consti-tuted a fair day’s work. Social pressure was put on him to conform, but without avail, since he enjoyed doing things the others disliked. The best-liked person in the group was the one who kept his output exactly where the group agreed it should be.

Inasmuch as the operators were agreed as to what constituted a day’s work, one might have expected rate of output to be about the same for each member of the group. This was by no means the case; there were marked differences. At fi rst the experiment-ers thought that the differences in individ-ual performance were related to differences in ability, so they compared each worker’s relative rank in output with his relative rank in intelligence and dexterity as measured by certain tests. The results were interesting: the lowest producer in the room ranked fi rst in intelligence and third in dexterity; the highest producer in the room was seventh in dexterity and lowest in intelligence. Here surely was a situation in which the native capacities of the men were not fi nding expression. From the viewpoint of logical, economic behavior, this room did not make sense. Only in terms of powerful sentiments could these individual differences in output level be explained. Each worker’s level of output refl ected his position in the informal organization of the group.

WHAT MAKES THE WORKER NOT WANT TO COÖPERATE

As a result of the Bank Wiring Observation Room, the Hawthorne researchers became more and more interested in the informal employee groups which tend to form within the formal organization of the company,

and which are not likely to be represented in the organization chart. They became interested in the beliefs and creeds which have the effect of making each individual feel an integral part of the group and which make the group appear as a single unit, in the social codes and norms of behavior by means of which employees automatically work together in a group without any con-scious choice as to whether they will or will not coöperate. They studied the important social functions these groups perform for their members, the histories of these infor-mal work groups, how they spontaneously appear, how they tend to perpetuate them-selves, multiply, and disappear, how they are in constant jeopardy from technical change, and hence how they tend to resist innovation. In particular, they became interested in those groups whose norms and codes of behavior are at variance with the technical and economic objectives of the company as a whole. They examined the social conditions under which it is more likely for the employee group to separate itself out in opposition to the remainder of the groups which make up the total organ-ization. In such phenomena they felt that they had at last arrived at the heart of the problem of effective collaboration. They obtained a new enlightenment of the pres-ent industrial scene; from this point of view, many perplexing problems became more intelligible.

Some people claim, for example, that the size of the pay envelope is the major demand which the employee is making of his job. All the worker wants is to be told what to do and to get paid for doing it. If we look at him and his job in terms of sentiments, this is far from being as generally true as we would like to believe. Most of us want the satisfaction that comes from being accepted and recognized as people of worth by our friends and work associates. Money is only a small part of this social recognition. The way we are greeted by our boss, being asked to help a newcomer, being asked to keep an eye on a diffi cult operation, being given a job requiring special skill—all of these are



acts of social recognition. They tell us how we stand in our work group. We all want tangible evidence of our social importance. We want to have a skill that is socially rec-ognized as useful. We want the feeling of security that comes not so much from the amount of money we have in the bank as from being an accepted member of a group. A man whose job is without social function is like a man without a country; the activity to which he has to give the major portion of his life is robbed of all human meaning and signifi cance. . . .

In summary, therefore, the Western Electric researches seem to me like a begin-ning on the road back to sanity in employee relations because (1) they offer a fruitful working hypothesis, a few simple and rela-tively clear ideas for the study and under-standing of human situations in business; (2) they offer a simple method by means of which we can explore and deal with the complex human problems in a business org-anization—this method is a human method: it deals with things which are important to

people; and (3) they throw a new light on the precondition for effective collaboration. Too often we think of collaboration as some-thing which can be logically or legally con-trived. The Western Electric studies indicate that it is far more a matter of sentiment than a matter of logic. Workers are not isolated, unrelated individuals; they are social ani-mals and should be treated as such.

This statement—the worker is a social animal and should be treated as such—is simple, but the systematic and consistent practice of this point of view is not. If it were systematically practiced, it would revolutionize present-day personnel work. Our technological development in the past hundred years has been tremendous. Our methods of handling people are still archaic. If this civilization is to survive, we must obtain a new understanding of human motivation and behavior in business organ-izations—an understanding which can be simply but effectively practiced. The Western Electric researches contribute a fi rst step in this direction.


171

Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370–396.

I. INTRODUCTION

In a previous paper [11] various proposi-tions were presented which would have to be included in any theory of human motiva-tion that could lay claim to being defi nitive. These conclusions may be briefl y summa-rized as follows:

1. The integrated wholeness of the organism must be one of the foundation stones of motivation theory.

2. The hunger drive (or any other physiologi-cal drive) was rejected as a centering point or model for a defi nitive theory of motiva-tion. Any drive that is somatically based and localizable was shown to be atypical rather than typical in human motivation.

3. Such a theory should stress and center itself upon ultimate or basic goals rather than partial or superfi cial ones, upon ends rather than means to these ends. Such a stress would imply a more central place for unconscious than for conscious motivations.

4. There are usually available various cul-tural paths to the same goal. Therefore conscious, specifi c, local-cultural desires are not as fundamental in motivation the-ory as the more basic, unconscious goals.

5. Any motivated behavior, either prepara-tory or consummatory, must be understood to be a channel through which many basic needs may be simultaneously expressed or satisfi ed. Typically an act has more than one motivation.

6. Practically all organismic states are to be understood as motivated and as motivating.

7. Human needs arrange themselves in hierarchies of prepotency. That is to say, the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction of another, more

pre-potent need. Man is a perpetually wanting animal. Also no need or drive can be treated as if it were isolated or discrete; every drive is related to the state of satis-faction or dissatisfaction of other drives.

8. Lists of drives will get us nowhere for vari-ous theoretical and practical reasons. Fur-thermore any classifi cation of motivations must deal with the problem of levels of specifi city or generalization of the motives to be classifi ed.

9. Classifi cations of motivations must be based upon goals rather than upon insti-gating drives or motivated behavior.

10. Motivation theory should be human- centered rather than animal-centered.

11. The situation or the fi eld in which the organism reacts must be taken into account but the fi eld alone can rarely serve as an exclusive explanation for behavior. Furthermore the fi eld itself must be interpreted in terms of the organism. Field theory cannot be a substitute for motivation theory.

12. Not only the integration of the organism must be taken into account, but also the possibility of isolated, specifi c, partial or segmental reactions.

It has since become necessary to add to these another affi rmation.

13. Motivation theory is not synonymous with behavior theory. The motivations are only one class of determinants of behavior. While behavior is almost always motivated, it is also almost always biologi-cally, culturally and situationally deter-mined as well.

The present paper is an attempt to formu-late a positive theory of motivation which will satisfy these theoretical demands and at the same time conform to the known

16A Theory of Human MotivationAbraham H. Maslow



facts, clinical and observational as well as experimental. It derives most directly, however, from clinical experience. This theory is, I think, in the functionalist tradi-tion of James and Dewey, and is fused with the holism of Wertheimer [15], Goldstein [5], and Gestalt Psychology, and with the dynamicism of Freud [3] and Adler [1]. This fusion or synthesis may arbitrarily be called a “general-dynamic” theory.

It is far easier to perceive and to criticize the aspects in motivation theory than to remedy them. Mostly this is because of the very serious lack of sound data in this area. I conceive this lack of sound facts to be due primarily to the absence of a valid theory of motivation. The present theory then must be considered to be a suggested program or framework for future research and must stand or fall, not so much on facts available or evidence presented, as upon researches yet to be done, researches suggested per-haps, by the questions raised in this paper.

II. THE BASIC NEEDS

The “Physiological” Needs. The needs that are usually taken as the starting point for motivation theory are the so-called physiological drives. Two recent lines of research make it necessary to revise our customary notions about these needs, fi rst, the development of the concept of homeo-stasis, and second, the fi nding that appetites (preferential choices among foods) are a fairly effi cient indication of actual needs or lacks in the body.

Homeostasis refers to the body’s auto-matic efforts to maintain a constant, nor-mal state of the blood stream. Cannon [2] has described this process for (1) the water content of the blood, (2) salt content, (3) sugar content, (4) protein content, (5) fat content, (6) calcium content, (7) oxygen content, (8) constant hydrogen-ion level (acid-base balance) and (9) constant tem-perature of the blood. Obviously this list can be extended to include other minerals, the hormones, vitamins, etc.

Young in a recent article [16] has summa-rized the work on appetite in its relation to body needs. If the body lacks some chemi-cal, the individual will tend to develop a specifi c appetite or partial hunger for that food element. . . .

It should be pointed out again that any of the physiological needs and the consum-matory behavior involved with them serve as channels for all sorts of other needs as well. That is to say, the person who thinks he is hungry may actually be seeking more for comfort, or dependence, than for vita-mins or proteins. Conversely, it is possible to satisfy the hunger need in part by other activities such as drinking water or smoking cigarettes. In other words, relatively isol-able as these physiological needs are, they are not completely so.

Undoubtedly these physiological needs are the most prepotent of all needs. What this means specifi cally is that, in the human being who is missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that the major motivation would be the physiologi-cal needs rather than any others. A person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else.

If all the needs are unsatisfi ed, and the organism is then dominated by the physiological needs, all other needs may become simply nonexistent or be pushed into the background. . . . For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry, no other interests exist but food. He dreams food, he remembers food, he thinks about food, he emotes only about food, he perceives only food and he wants only food. The more subtle determinants that ordinarily fuse with the physiological drives in organizing even feeding, drinking or sexual behavior, may not be so completely overwhelmed as to allow us to speak at this time (but only at this time) of pure hunger drive and behav-ior, with the one unqualifi ed aim of relief.

Another peculiar characteristic of the human organism when it is dominated by a certain need is that the whole philosophy of the future tends also to change. For our


A Theory of Human Motivation 173

chronically and extremely hungry man, Utopia can be defi ned very simply as a place where there is plenty of food. He tends to think that, if only he is guaranteed food for the rest of his life, he will be perfectly happy and will never want anything more. Life itself tends to be defi ned in terms of eat-ing. Anything else will be defi ned as unim-portant. Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, may all be waved aside as fripperies which are useless since they fail to fi ll the stomach. Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone.

It cannot possibly be denied that such things are true but their generality can be denied. Emergency conditions are, almost by defi nition, rare in the normally function-ing peaceful society. . . .

At once other (and “higher”) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hun-gers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfi ed, again new (and still “higher”) needs emerge and so on. This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency.

One main implication of this phrasing is that gratifi cation becomes as important a concept as deprivation in motivation theory, for it releases the organism from the domination of a relatively more physiologi-cal need, permitting thereby the emergence of other more social goals. The physiologi-cal needs, along with their partial goals, when chronically gratifi ed cease to exist as active determinants or organizers of behav-ior. They now exist only in a potential fashion in the sense that they may emerge again to dominate the organism if they are thwarted. But a want that is satisfi ed is no longer a want. The organism is dominated and its behavior organized only by unsatis-fi ed needs. If hunger is satisfi ed, it becomes unimportant in the current dynamics of the individual. . . .

The Safety Needs. If the physiological needs are relatively well gratifi ed, there then emerges a new set of needs, which we may categorize roughly as the safety needs. All

that has been said of the physiological needs is equally true, although in lesser degree, of these desires. The organism may equally well be wholly dominated by them. They may serve as the almost exclusive organizers of behavior, recruiting all the capacities of the organism in their service, and we may then fairly describe the whole organism as a safety-seeking mechanism. Again we may say of the receptors, the effectors, of the intellect and the other capacities that they are primarily safety-seeking tools. Again, as in the hungry man, we fi nd that the dominating goal is a strong determinant not only of his current world-outlook and philosophy but also of his philosophy of the future. Practically every-thing looks less important than safety (even sometimes the physiological needs which being satisfi ed, are now underestimated). A man, in this state, if it is extreme enough and chronic enough, may be characterized as living almost for safety alone.

Although in this paper we are interested primarily in the needs of the adult, we can approach an understanding of his safety needs perhaps more effi ciently by observa-tion of infants and children, in whom these needs are much more simple and obvious. One reason for the clearer appearance of the threat or danger reaction in infants, is that they do not inhibit this reaction at all, whereas adults in our society have been taught to inhibit it at all costs. Thus even when adults do feel their safety threatened we may not be able to see this on the sur-face. Infants will react in a total fashion and as if they were endangered, if they are disturbed or dropped suddenly, startled by loud noises, fl ashing light, or other unusual sensory stimulation, by rough handling, by general loss of support in the mother’s arms, or by inadequate support.1

In infants we can also see a much more direct reaction to bodily illnesses of vari-ous kinds. Sometimes these illnesses seem to be immediately and per se threatening and seem to make the child feel unsafe. For instance, vomiting, colic or other sharp pains seem to make the child look at the whole world in a different way. At such a



moment of pain, it may be postulated that, for the child, the appearance of the whole world suddenly changes from sunniness to darkness, so to speak, and becomes a place in which anything at all might happen, in which previously stable things have sud-denly become unstable. Thus a child who because of some bad food is taken ill may, for a day or two, develop fear, nightmares, and a need for protection and reassurance never seen in him before his illness.

Another indication of the child’s need for safety is his preference for some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. He seems to want a predictable, orderly world. For instance, injustice, unfairness, or incon-sistency in the parents seems to make a child feel anxious and unsafe. This atti-tude may be not so much because of the injustice per se or any particular pains involved, but rather because this treat-ment threatens to make the world look unreliable, or unsafe, or unpredictable. Young children seem to thrive better under a system which has at least a skel-etal outline of rigidity, in which there is a schedule of a kind, some sort of routine, something that can be counted upon, not only for the present but also far into the future. Perhaps one could express this more accurately by saying that the child needs an organized world rather than an unorganized or unstructured one. . . .

From these and similar observations, we may generalize and say that the average child in our society generally prefers a safe, orderly, predictable, organized world, which he can count on, and in which unexpected, unmanageable or other dangerous things do not happen, and in which, in any case, he has all-powerful parents who protect and shield him from harm.

That these reactions may so easily be observed in children is in a way a proof of the fact that children in our society, feel too unsafe (or, in a word, are badly brought up). Children who are reared in an unthreaten-ing, loving family do not ordinarily react as we have described above [14]. In such chil-dren the danger reactions are apt to come

mostly to objects or situations that adults too would consider dangerous.2

The healthy, normal, fortunate adult in our culture is largely satisfi ed in his safety needs. The peaceful, smoothly running, “good” society ordinarily makes its members feel safe enough from wild animals, extremes of temperature, criminals, assault and mur-der, tyranny, etc. Therefore, in a very real sense, he no longer has any safety needs as active motivators. Just as a sated man no longer feels hungry, a safe man no longer feels endangered. If we wish to see these needs directly and clearly we must turn to neurotic or near-neurotic individuals, and to the economic and social underdogs. In between these extremes, we can perceive the expressions of safety needs only in such phenomena as, for instance, the common preference for a job with tenure and protec-tion, the desire for a savings account, and for insurance of various kinds (medical, dental, unemployment, disability, old age).

Other broader aspects of the attempt to seek safety and stability in the world are seen in the very common preference for familiar rather than unfamiliar things, or for the known rather than the unknown. The tendency to have some religion or world-philosophy that organizes the universe and the men in it into some sort of satisfactorily coherent, meaningful whole is also in part motivated by safety-seeking. Here too we may list science and philosophy in general as partially motivated by the safety needs (we shall see later that there are also other motivations to scientifi c, philosophical or religious endeavor).

Otherwise the need for safety is seen as an active and dominant mobilizer of the organ-ism’s resources only in emergencies, e.g., war, disease, natural catastrophes, crime waves, societal disorganization, neurosis, brain injury, chronically bad situation. . . .

The neurosis in which the search for safety takes its clearest form is in the com-pulsive-obsessive neurosis. Compulsive-obsessives try frantically to order and stabilize the world so that no unmanage-able, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will



ever appear [12]. They hedge themselves about with all sorts of ceremonials, rules and formulas so that every possible contin-gency may be provided for and so that no new contingencies may appear. They are much like the brain injured cases, described by Goldstein [5], who manage to maintain their equilibrium by avoiding everything unfamiliar and strange and by ordering their restricted world in such a neat, disciplined, orderly fashion that everything in the world can be counted upon. . . .

The Love Needs. If both the physi-ological and the safety needs are fairly well gratifi ed, then there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new center. Now the person will feel keenly, as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart, or a wife, or children. He will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general, namely, for a place in his group, and he will strive with great intensity to achieve this goal. He will want to attain such a place more than anything else in the world and may even forget that once, when he was hungry, he sneered at love. . . .

One thing that must be stressed at this point is that love is not synonymous with sex. Sex may be studied as a purely physi-ological need. Ordinarily sexual behavior is multi-determined, that is to say, deter-mined not only by sexual but also by other needs chief among which are the love and affection needs. Also not to be overlooked is the fact that the love needs involve both giving and receiving love.3

The Esteem Needs. All people in our society (with a few pathological excep-tions) have a need or desire for a stable, fi rmly based, (usually) high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. By fi rmly based self-esteem, we mean that which is soundly based upon real capacity, achieve-ment and respect from others. These needs may be classifi ed into two subsidiary sets.

These are, fi rst, the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for confi dence in the face of the world, and for indepen-dence and freedom.4 Secondly, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige (defi ning it as respect or esteem from other people), recognition, attention, importance or appreciation.5 These needs have been relatively stressed by Alfred Adler and his followers, and have been relatively neglected by Freud and the psy-choanalysts. More and more today however there is appearing widespread appreciation of their central importance.

Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confi dence, worth, strength, capability and adequacy of being useful and necessary in the world. But thwarting of these needs produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness and of helplessness. These feelings in turn give rise to either basic discouragement or else compensatory or neurotic trends. An appreciation of the necessity of basic self-confi dence and an understanding of how helpless people are without it, can be easily gained from a study of severe traumatic neurosis [6].6

The Need for Self-Actualization. Even if all these needs are satisfi ed, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new dis-content and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fi t-ted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.

This term, fi rst coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specifi c and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfi llment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become every-thing that one is capable of becoming.

The specifi c form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. In one individual it may take the



form of the desire to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions. It is not necessarily a creative urge although in peo-ple who have any capacities for creation it will take this form.

The clear emergence of these needs rests upon prior satisfaction of the physi-ological, safety, love and esteem needs. We shall call people who are satisfi ed in these needs, basically satisfi ed people, and it is from these that we may expect the fullest (and healthiest) creativeness.7 Since, in our society, basically satisfi ed people are the exception, we do not know much about self-actualization, either experimentally or clinically. It remains a challenging problem for research.

The Preconditions for the Basic Need Satisfactions. There are certain conditions which are immediate prerequisites for the basic need satisfactions. Danger to these is reacted to almost as if it were a direct dan-ger to the basic needs themselves. Such conditions as freedom to speak, freedom to do what one wishes so long as no harm is done to others, freedom to express one’s self, freedom to investigate and seek for information, freedom to defend one’s self, justice, fairness, honesty, orderliness in the group are examples of such preconditions for basic need satisfactions. Thwarting in these freedoms will be reacted to with a threat or emergency response. These con-ditions are not ends in themselves but they are almost so since they are so closely related to the basic needs, which are apparently the only ends in themselves. These conditions are defended because without them the basic satisfactions are quite impossible, or at least, very severely endangered.

If we remember that the cognitive capac-ities (perceptual, intellectual, learning) are a set of adjustive tools, which have, among other functions, that of satisfaction of our basic needs, then it is clear that any danger to them, any deprivation or blocking of their free use, must also be indirectly threatening

to the basic needs themselves. Such a state-ment is a partial solution of the general prob-lems of curiosity, the search for knowledge, truth and wisdom, and the ever-persistent urge to solve the cosmic mysteries.

We must therefore introduce another hypothesis and speak of degrees of close-ness to the basic needs, for we have already pointed out that any conscious desires (par-tial goals) are more or less important as they are more or less close to the basic needs. The same statement may be made for vari-ous behavior acts. An act is psychologically important if it contributes directly to satis-faction of basic needs. The less directly it so contributes, or the weaker this contribu-tion is, the less important this act must be conceived to be from the point of view of dynamic psychology. A similar statement may be made for the various defense or cop-ing mechanisms. Some are very directly related to the protection or attainment of the basic needs, others are only weakly and distantly related. Indeed if we wished, we could speak of more basic and less basic defense mechanisms, and then affi rm that danger to the more basic defenses is more threatening than danger to less basic defenses (always remembering that this is so only because of their relationship to the basic needs). . . .

III. FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BASIC NEEDS

The Degree of Fixity of the Hierarchy of Basic Needs. We have spoken so far as if this hierarchy were a fi xed order but actu-ally it is not nearly as rigid as we may have implied. It is true that most of the people with whom we have worked have seemed to have these basic needs in about the order that has been indicated. However, there have been a number of exceptions.

(1) There are some people in whom, for instance, self-esteem seems to be more important than love. This most common reversal in the hierarchy is usually due to the development of the notion that the person



who is most likely to be loved is a strong or powerful person, one who inspires respect or fear, and who is self-confi dent or aggressive. Therefore such people who lack love and seek it, may try hard to put on a front of aggressive, confi dent behavior. But essentially they seek high self-esteem and its behavior expressions more as a means-to-an-end than for its own sake; they seek self-assertion for the sake of love rather than for self-esteem itself.

(2) There are other, apparently in-nately creative people in whom the drive to creativeness seems to be more impor-tant than any other counter-determinant. Their creativeness might appear not as self- actualization released by basic satisfaction, but in spite of lack of basic satisfaction.

(3) In certain people the level of aspi-ration may be permanently deadened or lowered. That is to say, the less prepotent goals may simply be lost, and may disappear forever, so that the person who has experi-enced life at a very low level, i.e., chronic unemployment, may continue to be satis-fi ed for the rest of his life if only he can get enough food.

(4) The so-called “psychopathic person-ality” is another example of permanent loss of the love needs. These are people who, according to the best data available [7], have been starved for love in the earliest months of their lives and have simply lost forever the desire and the ability to give and to receive affection (as animals lose sucking or pecking refl exes that are not exercised soon enough after birth).

(5) Another cause of reversal of the hierarchy is that when a need has been satisfi ed for a long time, this need may be underevaluated. . . .

(6) Another partial explanation of apparent reversals is seen in the fact that we have been talking about the hierar-chy of prepotency in terms of consciously felt wants or desires rather than behavior. Looking at behavior itself may give us the wrong impression. What we have claimed is that the person will want the more basic of two needs when deprived in both. There is no necessary implication here that he will

act upon his desires. Let us say again that there are many determinants of behavior other than the needs and desires.

(7) Perhaps more important than all these exceptions are the ones that involve ideals, high social standards, high values and the like. With such values people be-come martyrs; they will give up everything for the sake of a particular ideal, or value. These people may be understood, at least in part, by reference to one basic concept (or hypothesis) which may be called “increased frustration-tolerance through early grati-fi cation.” People who have been satisfi ed in their basic needs throughout their lives, particularly in their earlier years, seem to develop exceptional power to withstand present or future thwarting of these needs simply because they have strong, healthy character structure as a result of basic sat-isfaction. They are the “strong” people who can easily weather disagreement or opposi-tion, who can swim against the stream of public opinion and who can stand up for the truth at great personal cost. It is just the ones who have loved and been well loved, and who have had many deep friendships who can hold out against hatred, rejection or persecution.

I say all this in spite of the fact that there is a certain amount of sheer habituation which is also involved in any full discus-sion of frustration-tolerance. For instance, it is likely that those persons who have been accustomed to relative starvation for a long time, are partially enabled thereby to withstand food deprivation. What sort of balance must be made between these two tendencies, of habitation on the one hand, and of past satisfaction breeding present frustration-tolerance on the other hand, re-mains to be worked out by further research. Meanwhile we may assume that they are both operative, side by side, since they do not contradict each other. In respect to this phenomenon of increased frustration-tolerance, it seems probable that the most important gratifi cations come in the fi rst two years of life. That is to say, people who have been made secure and strong in the



earliest years, tend to remain secure and strong thereafter in the face of whatever threatens.

Degrees of Relative Satisfaction. So far, our theoretical discussion may have given the impression that these fi ve sets of needs are somehow in a step-wise, all-or-none relationship to each other. We have spoken in such terms as the following: “If one need is satisfi ed, then another emerg-es.” This statement might give the false impression that a need must be satisfi ed 100 per cent before the next need emerges. In actual fact, most members of our society who are normal, are partially satisfi ed in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfi ed in all their basic needs at the same time. A more realistic description of the hierarchy would be in terms of decreasing percentages of satisfaction as we go upon the hierarchy of prepotency. For instance, if I may assign arbitrary fi gures for the sake of illustration, it is as if the average citizen is satisfi ed per-haps 85 per cent in his physiological needs, 70 per cent in his safety needs, 50 per cent in his love needs, 40 per cent in his self-esteem needs, and 10 per cent in his self-actualization needs.

As for the concept of emergence of a new need after satisfaction of the prepotent need, this emergence is not a sudden, salu-tatory phenomenon but rather a gradual emergence by slow degrees from nothing-ness. For instance, if prepotent need A is satisfi ed only 10 per cent then need B may not be visible at all. However, as this need A becomes satisfi ed 25 per cent, need B may emerge 5 per cent, as need A becomes satis-fi ed 75 per cent need B may emerge 90 per cent, and so on.

Unconscious Character of Needs. These needs are neither necessarily conscious nor unconscious. On the whole, however, in the average person, they are more often unconscious rather than conscious. . . .

Cultural Specifi city and Generality of Needs. This classifi cation of basic needs

makes some attempt to take account of the relative unity behind the superfi cial differ-ences in specifi c desires from one culture to another. Certainly in any particular cul-ture an individual’s conscious motivational content will usually be extremely different from the conscious motivational content of an individual in another society. However, it is the common experience of anthropolo-gists that people, even in different societies, are much more alike than we would think from our fi rst contact with them, and that as we know them better we seem to fi nd more and more of this commonness. . . .

Multiple Motivations of Behavior. These needs must be understood not to be exclusive or single determiners of cer-tain kinds of behavior. An example may be found in any behavior that seems to be physiologically motivated, such as eat-ing, or sexual play or the like. The clinical psychologists have long since found that any behavior may be a channel through which fl ow various determinants. Or to say it in another way, most behavior is multi- motivated. Within the sphere of motiva-tional determinants any behavior tends to be determined by several or all of the basic needs simultaneously rather than by only one of them. The latter would be more an exception than the former. Eating may be partially for the sake of fi lling the stom-ach, and partially for the sake of comfort and amelioration of other needs. One may make love not only for pure sexual release, but also to convince one’s self of one’s mas-culinity, or to make a conquest, to feel pow-erful, or to win more basic affection. As an illustration, I may point out that it would be possible (theoretically if not practically) to analyze a single act of an individual and see in it the expression of his physiological needs, his safety needs, his love needs, his esteem needs and self-actualization. This contrasts sharply with the more naive brand of trait psychology in which one trait or one motive accounts for a certain kind of act, i.e., an aggressive act is traced solely to a trait of aggressiveness.



Multiple Determinants of Behavior. Not all behavior is determined by the basic needs. We might even say that not all behav-ior is motivated. There are many determi-nants of behavior other than motives.8 For instance, one other important class of deter-minants is the so-called “fi eld” determinants. Theoretically, at least, behavior may be determined completely by the fi eld, or even by specifi c isolated external stimuli, as in association of ideas, or certain conditioned refl exes. If in response to the stimulus word “table,” I immediately perceive a memory image of a table, this response certainly has nothing to do with my basic needs.

Secondly, we may call attention again to the concept of “degree of closeness to the basic needs” or “degree of motivation.” Some behavior is highly motivated, other behavior is only weakly motivated. Some is not motivated at all (but all behavior is determined).

Another important point9 is that there is a basic difference between expressive behavior and coping behavior (funct io-nal striving, purposive goal seeking). An exp re ssive behavior does not try to do any-thing; it is simply a refl ection of the per-sonality. A stupid man behaves stupidly, not because he wants to, or tries to, or is motivated to, but simply because he is what he is. The same is true when I speak in a bass voice rather than tenor or sopr-ano. The random movements of a healthy child, the smile on the face of a happy man even when he is alone, the springi-ness of the healthy man’s walk, and the erectness of his carriage are other examples of expressive, non- functional behavior. Also the style in which a man carries out almost all his behavior, motivated as well as unmotivated, is often expressive.

We may then ask, is all behavior expres-sive or refl ective of the character structure? The answer is “No.” Rote, habitual, autom-atized, or conventional behavior may or may not be expressive. The same is true for most “stimulus-bound” behaviors.

It is fi nally necessary to stress that expres-siveness of behavior, and goal-directedness

of behavior are not mutually exclusive cat-egories. Average behavior is usually both.

Goals as Centering Principle in Motiv-ation Theory. It will be observed that the basic principle in our classifi cation has been neither the instigation nor the motivated behavior but rather the functions, effects, purposes, or goals of the behavior. It has been proven suffi ciently by various people that this is the most suitable point for cen-tering any motivation theory.10

Animal- and Human-Centering. This theory starts with the human being rather than any lower and presumably “simpler” animal. Too many of the fi ndings that have been made in animals have been proven to be true for animals but not for the human being. There is no reason whatsoever why we should start with animals in order to study human motivation. . . .

Motivation and the Theory of Psy-chopathogenesis. The conscious moti-vational content of everyday life has, according to the foregoing, been con-ceived to be relatively important or unimportant accordingly as it is more or less closely related to the basic goals. A desire for an ice cream cone might actu-ally be an indirect expression of a desire for love. If it is, then this desire for the ice cream cone becomes extremely important motivation. If however the ice cream is simply something to cool the mouth with, or a casual appetitive reaction, then the desire is relatively unimportant. Every-day conscious desires are to be regarded as symptoms, as surface indicators of more basic needs. If we were to take these super-ficial desires at their face value we would find ourselves in a state of complete con-fusion which could never be resolved, since we would be dealing seriously with symptoms rather than with what lay behind the symptoms.

Thwarting of unimportant desires pro-duces no psychopathological results; thwar-ting of a basically important need does produce such results. Any theory of



psychopathogenesis must then be based on a sound theory of motivation. A confl ict or a frustration is not necessarily pathogenic. It becomes so only when it threatens or thwarts the basic needs, or partial needs that are closely related to the basic needs [8].

The Role of Gratifi ed Needs. It has been pointed out above several times that our needs usually emerge only when more prepotent needs have been gratifi ed. Thus gratifi cation has an important role in motivation theory. Apart from this, however, needs cease to play an active determining or organizing role as soon as they are gratifi ed.

What this means is that, e.g., a basically satisfi ed person no longer has the needs for esteem, love, safety, etc. . . .

It is such considerations as these that suggest the bold postulation that a man who is thwarted in any of his basic needs may fairly be envisaged simply as a sick man. This is a fair parallel to our designa-tion as “sick” of the man who lacks vita-mins or minerals. Who is to say that a lack of love is less important than a lack of vitamins? Since we know the pathogenic effects of love starvation, who is to say that we are invoking value-questions in an unscientifi c or illegitimate way, any more than the physician does who diagnoses and treats pellagra or scurvy? If I were permitted this usage, I should then say simply that a healthy man is primarily motivated by his needs to develop and actualize his fullest potentialities and capacities. If a man has any other basic needs in any active, chronic sense, then he is simply an unhealthy man. He is as surely sick as if he had suddenly developed a strong salt-hunger or calcium hunger.11

If this statement seems unusual or para-doxical the reader may be assured that this is only one among many such paradoxes that will appear as we revise our ways of look-ing at man’s deeper motivations. When we ask what man wants of life, we deal with his very essence.

IV. SUMMARY

(1) There are at least fi ve sets of goals, which we may call basic needs. These are briefl y physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. In addition, we are motivated by the desire to achieve or main-tain the various conditions upon which these basic satisfactions rest and by certain more intellectual desires.

(2) These basic goals are related to each other, being arranged in a hierarchy of prepotency. This means that the most prepotent goal will monopolize conscious-ness and will tend of itself to organize the recruitment of the various capacities of the organism. The less prepotent needs are min-imized, even forgotten or denied. But when a need is fairly well satisfi ed, the next pre-potent (“higher”) need emerges, in turn to dominate the conscious life and to serve as the center of organization of behavior, since gratifi ed needs are not active motivators.

Thus man is a perpetually wanting ani-mal. Ordinarily the satisfaction of these wants is not altogether mutually exclusive, but only tends to be. The average member of our society is most often partially satisfi ed and partially unsatisfi ed in all of his wants. The hierarchy principle is usually empiri-cally observed in terms of increasing per-centages of nonsatisfaction as we go up the hierarchy. Reversals of the average order of the hierarchy are sometimes observed. Also it has been observed that an individual may permanently lose the higher wants in the hierarchy under special conditions. There are not only ordinarily multiple motiva-tions for usual behavior, but in addition many determinants other than motives.

(3) Any thwarting or possibility of thwa rting of these basic human goals, or danger to the defenses which protect them, or to the conditions upon which they rest, is considered to be a psychological threat. With a few exceptions, all psychopathology may be partially traced to such threats. A basically thwarted man may actually be defi ned as a “sick” man, if we wish.



(4) It is such basic threats which bring about the general emergency reactions. . . .

NOTES

1. As the child grows up, sheer knowledge and familiarity as well as better motor development make these “dangers” less and less dangerous and more and more manageable. Throughout life it may be said that one of the main conative functions of education is this neutralizing of apparent dangers through knowledge, e.g., I am not afraid of thunder because I know something about it.

2. A “test battery” for safety might be confronting the child with a small exploding fi recracker, or with a bewhiskered face, having the mother leave the room, putting him upon a high ladder, a hypodermic injection, having a mouse crawl up to him, etc. Of course I cannot seriously recommend the deliberate use of such “tests” for they might very well harm the child being tested. But these and similar situations come up by the score in the child’s ordinary day-to-day living and may be observed. There is no reason why these stimuli should not be used with, for example, young chimpanzees.

3. For further details see [10]. 4. Whether or not this particular desire is

universal we do not know. The crucial question, especially important today, is “Will men who are enslaved and dominated, inevitably feel dissatisfi ed and rebellious?” We may assume on the basis of commonly known clinical data that a man who has known true freedom (not paid for by giving up safety and security but rather built on the basis of adequate safety and security) will not willingly or easily allow his freedom to be taken away from him. But we do not know that this is true for the person born into slavery. The events of the next decade should give us our answer. See discussion of this problem in [4].

5. Perhaps the desire for prestige and respect from others is subsidiary to the desire for self-esteem or confi dence in oneself. Observation of children seems to indicate

that this is so, but clinical data give no clear support for such a conclusion.

6. For more extensive discussion of normal self-esteem, as well as for reports of various researchers, see [9].

7. Clearly creative behavior, like painting, is like any other behavior in having multiple determinants. It may be seen in “innately creative” people whether they are satisfi ed or not, happy or unhappy, hungry or sated. Also it is clear that creative activity may be compensatory, ameliorative or purely economic. It is my impression (as yet unconfi rmed) that it is possible to distinguish the artistic and intellectual products of basically satisfi ed people from those of basically unsatisfi ed people by inspection alone. In any case, here too we must distinguish, in a dynamic fashion, the overt behavior itself from its various motivations or purposes.

8. I am aware that many psychologists and psychoanalysts use the term “motivated” and “determined” synonymously, e.g., Freud. But I consider this an obfuscating usage. Sharp distinctions are necessary for clarity of thought, and precision in experimentation.

9. To be discussed fully in a subsequent publication.

10. The interested reader is referred to the very excellent discussion of this point in Murray’s Explorations in Personality [13].

11. If we were to use the word “sick” in this way, we should then also have to face squarely the relations of man to his society. One clear implication of our defi nition would be that (1) since a man is to be called sick who is basically thwarted, and (2) since such basic thwarting is made possible ultimately only by forces outside the individual, then (3) sickness in the individual must come ultimately from a sickness in the society. The “good” or healthy society would then be defi ned as one that permitted man’s highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all his prepotent basic needs.

REFERENCES

1. Adler, A. Social interest. London: Faber & Faber, 1938.



2. Cannon, W. B. Wisdom of the body. New York: Norton, 1932.

3. Freud, S. New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1933.

4. Fromm, E. Escape from freedom. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941.

5. Goldstein, K. The organism. New York: American Book Co., 1939.

6. Kardiner, A. The traumatic neuroses of war. New York: Hoeber, 1941.

7. Levy, D. M. Primary effect of hunger. Amer. J. Psychiat., 1937, 94, 643–652.

8. Maslow, A. H. Confl ict, frustration, and the theory of threat. J. abnorm. (soc.) Psychol., 1943, 38, 81–86.

9. ———. Dominance, personality and social behavior in women. J. soc. Psychol., 1939, 10, 3–39.

10. ———. The dynamics of psychological security-insecurity. Character & Pers., 1942, 10, 331–344.

11. ———. A preface to motivation theory. Psychosomatic Med., 1943, 5, 85–92.

12. Maslow, A.H, & Mittlemann, B. Principles of abnormal psychology. New York: Harper & Bros., 1941.

13. Murray, H. A., et al. Explorations in person-ality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938.

14. Shirley, M. Children’s adjustments to a strange situation. J. abnorm. (soc.) Psychol., 1942, 37, 201–217.

15. Wertheimer, M. Unpublished lectures at the New School for Social Research.

16. Young, P. T. Motivation of behavior. New York: Wiley, 1936.

17. ———. The experimental analysis of appetite. Psychol. Bull., 1941, 38, 129–164.


183

Management Review (November 1957). © 1957 by the American Management Association, New York. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Note: This article is based on an address by Dr. McGregor before the Fifth Anniversary Convocation of the MIT School of Industrial Management.

It has become trite to say that industry has the fundamental know-how to utilize physical science and technology for the material benefi t of mankind, and that we must now learn how to utilize the social sciences to make our human organizations truly effective.

To a degree, the social sciences today are in a position like that of the physical sci-ences with respect to atomic energy in the thirties. We know that past conceptions of the nature of man are inadequate and, in many ways, incorrect. We are becoming quite certain that, under proper conditions, unimagined resources of creative human energy could become available within the organizational setting. . . .

MANAGEMENT’S TASK: THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW

The conventional conception of manage-ment’s task in harnessing human energy to organizational requirements can be stated broadly in terms of three propositions. In order to avoid the complications introduced by a label, let us call this set of propositions “Theory X”:

1. Management is responsible for organizing the elements of productive enterprise—money, materials, equipment, people—in the interest of economic ends.

2. With respect to people, this is a process of directing their efforts, motivating them, controlling their actions, modify-ing their behavior to fi t the needs of the organization.

3. Without this active intervention by man-agement, people would be passive—even resistant—to organizational needs. They must therefore be persuaded, rewarded, punished, controlled—their activities must be directed. This is management’s task. We often sum it up by saying that management consists of getting things done through other people.

Behind this conventional theory there are several additional beliefs—less explicit, but widespread:

4. The average man is by nature indo-lent—he works as little as possible.

5. He lacks ambition, dislikes responsibility, prefers to be led.

6. He is inherently self-centered, indifferent to organizational needs.

7. He is by nature resistant to change. 8. He is gullible, not very bright, the ready

dupe of the charlatan and the demagogue.

The human side of economic enterprise today is fashioned from propositions and beliefs such as these. Conventional organ-ization structures and managerial poli-cies, practices, and programs refl ect these assumptions.

In accomplishing its task—with these assumptions as guides—management has conceived of a range of possibilities.

At one extreme, management can be “hard” or “strong.” The methods for directing behavior involve coercion and threat (usually disguised), close supervision, tight controls over behavior. At the other extreme, manage-ment can be “soft” or “weak.” The methods for directing behavior involve being permis-sive, satisfying people’s demands, achieving

17The Human Side of EnterpriseDouglas Murray McGregor



harmony. Then they will be tractable, accept direction.

This range has been fairly completely explored during the past half century, and management has learned some things from the exploration. There are diffi culties in the “hard” approach. Force breeds coun-terforces: restriction of output, antagonism, militant unionism, subtle but effective sabo-tage of management objectives. This “hard” approach is especially diffi cult during times of full employment.

There are also diffi culties in the “soft” approach. It leads frequently to the abdica-tion of management—to harmony, perhaps, but to indifferent performance. People take advantage of the soft approach. They contin-ually expect more but they give less and less.

Currently, the popular theme is “fi rm but fair.” This is an attempt to gain the advantages of both the hard and the soft approaches. It is reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt’s “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

IS THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW CORRECT?

. . . The social scientist does not deny that human behavior in industrial organization today is approximately what management perceives it to be. He has, in fact, observed it and studied it fairly extensively. But he is pretty sure that this behavior is not a con-sequence of man’s inherent nature. It is a consequence rather of the nature of indus-trial organizations, of management philoso-phy, policy, and practice. The conventional approach of Theory X is based on mistaken notions of what is cause and what is effect.

Perhaps the best way to indicate why the conventional approach of management is inadequate is to consider the subject of motivation.

PHYSIOLOGICAL NEEDS

Man is a wanting animal—as soon as one of his needs is satisfi ed, another appears in its

place. This process is unending. It continues from birth to death. . . .

A satisfi ed need is not a motivator of behav-ior! This is a fact of profound signifi cance that is regularly ignored in the conven-tional approach to the management of people. Consider your own need for air: Except as you are deprived of it, it has no appreciable motivating effect upon your behavior.

SAFETY NEEDS

When the physiological needs are reason-ably satisfi ed, needs at the next higher level begin to dominate man’s behavior—to motivate him. These are called safety needs. They are needs for protection against danger, threat, deprivation. Some people mistakenly refer to these as needs for secu-rity. However, unless man is in a dependent relationship where he fears arbitrary depri-vation, he does not demand security. The need is for the “fairest possible break.” When he is confi dent of this, he is more than will-ing to take risks. But when he feels threat-ened or dependent, his greatest need is for guarantees, for protection, for security.

The fact needs little emphasis that, since every industrial employee is in a depen-dent relationship, safety needs may assume considerable importance. Arbitrary man-agement actions, behavior which arouses uncertainty with respect to continued employment or which refl ects favoritism or discrimination, unpredictable administra-tion of policy—these can be powerful moti-vators of the safety needs in the employment relationship at every level, from worker to vice president.

SOCIAL NEEDS

When man’s physiological needs are satis-fi ed and he is no longer fearful about his physical welfare, his social needs become important motivators of his behavior—needs for belonging, for association, for


The Human Side of Enterprise 185

acceptance by his fellows, for giving and receiving friendship and love.

Management knows today of the exis-tence of these needs, but it often assumes quite wrongly that they represent a threat to the organization. Many studies have demonstrated that the tightly knit, cohe-sive work group may, under proper condi-tions, be far more effective than an equal number of separate individuals in achieving organization goals.

Yet management, fearing group hostility to its own objectives, often goes to consid-erable lengths to control and direct human efforts in ways that are inimical to the nat-ural “groupiness” of human beings. When man’s social needs—and perhaps his safety needs, too—are thus thwarted, he behaves in ways which tend to defeat organizational objectives. He becomes resistant, antago-nistic, uncooperative. But this behavior is a consequence, not a cause.

EGO NEEDS

Above the social needs—in the sense that they do not become motivators until lower needs are reasonably satisfi ed—are the needs of greatest signifi cance to man-agement and to man himself. They are the egoistic needs, and they are of two kinds:

1. Those needs that relate to one’s self-esteem—needs for self-confi dence, for independence, for achievement, for com-petence, for knowledge.

2. Those needs that relate to one’s reputa-tion—needs for status, for recognition, for appreciation, for the deserved respect of one’s fellows.

Unlike the lower needs, these are rarely satisfi ed: man seeks indefi nitely for more satisfaction of these needs once they have become important to him. But they do not appear in any signifi cant way until physiological, safety, and social needs are all reasonably satisfi ed.

The typical industrial organization offers few opportunities for the satisfaction of these egoistic needs to people at lower

levels in the hierarchy. The conventional methods of organizing work, particularly in mass-production industries, give little heed to these aspects of human motivation. If the practices of scientifi c management were deliberately calculated to thwart these needs, they could hardly accomplish this purpose better than they do.

SELF-FULFILLMENT NEEDS

Finally—a capstone, as it were, on the hier-archy of man’s needs—there are what we may call the needs for self-fulfi llment. These are the needs for realizing one’s own poten-tialities, for continued self-development, for being creative in the broadest sense of that term.

It is clear that the conditions of modern life give only limited opportunity for these relatively weak needs to obtain expression. The deprivation most people experience with respect to other lower-level needs diverts their energies into the struggle to satisfy those needs, and the needs for self-fulfi llment remain dormant.

MANAGEMENT AND MOTIVATION

We recognize readily enough that a man suffering from a severe-dietary defi ciency is sick. The deprivation of physiological needs has behavioral consequences. The same is true—although less well recognized—of deprivations of higher-level needs. The man whose needs for safety, association, independence, or status are thwarted is sick just as surely as the man who has rickets. And his sickness will have behavioral con-sequences. We will be mistaken if we attri-bute his resultant passivity, his hostility, his refusal to accept responsibility to his inher-ent “human nature.” These forms of behav-ior are symptoms of illness—of deprivation of his social and egoistic needs.

The man whose lower-level needs are satisfi ed is not motivated to satisfy those needs any longer. For practical purposes



they exist no longer. Management often asks, “Why aren’t people more productive? We pay good wages, provide good working conditions, have excellent fringe benefi ts and steady employment. Yet people do not seem to be willing to put forth more than minimum effort.”

The fact that management has provided for these physiological and safety needs has shifted the motivational emphasis to the social and perhaps to the egoistic needs. Unless there are opportunities at work to satisfy these higher-level needs, people will be deprived; and their behavior will refl ect this deprivation. Under such conditions, if management continues to focus its atten-tion on physiological needs, its efforts are bound to be ineffective.

People will make insistent demands for more money under these conditions. It becomes more important than ever to buy the material goods and services which can provide limited satisfaction of the thwarted needs. Although money has only limited value in satisfying many higher-level needs, it can become the focus of interest if it is the only means available.

THE CARROT-AND-STICK APPROACH

The carrot-and-stick theory of motivation (like Newtonian physical theory) works rea-sonably well under certain circumstances. The means for satisfying man’s physiologi-cal and (within limits) his safety needs can be provided or withheld by manage-ment. Employment itself is such a means, and so are wages, working conditions, and benefi ts. By these means the individual can be controlled so long as he is struggling for subsistence.

But the carrot-and-stick theory does not work at all once man has reached an adequate subsistence level and is motivated primarily by higher needs. Management cannot provide a man with self-respect, or with the respect of his fellows, or with the satisfaction of needs for self-fulfi llment.

It can create such conditions that he is encouraged and enabled to seek such satis-factions for himself, or it can thwart him by failing to create those conditions.

But this creation of conditions is not “control.” It is not a good device for direct-ing behavior. And so management fi nds itself in an odd position. The high standard of living created by our modern technologi-cal know-how provides quite adequately for the satisfaction of physiological and safety needs. The only signifi cant exception is where management practices have not cre-ated confi dence in a “fair break”—and thus where safety needs are thwarted. But by making possible the satisfaction of low-level needs, management has deprived itself of the ability to use as motivators the devices on which conventional theory has taught it to rely—rewards, promises, incentives, or threats and other coercive devices.

The philosophy of management by direc-tion and control—regardless of whether it is hard or soft—is inadequate to motivate because the human needs on which this approach relies are today unimportant motivators of behavior. Direction and con-trol are essentially useless in motivating people whose important needs are social and egoistic. Both the hard and the soft approach fail today because they are simply irrelevant to the situation.

People, deprived of opportunities to satisfy at work the needs which are now important to them, behave exactly as we might predict—with indolence, passivity, resistance to change, lack of responsibil-ity, willingness to follow the demagogue, unreasonable demands for economic ben-efi ts. It would seem that we are caught in a web of our own weaving.

A NEW THEORY OF MANAGEMENT

For these and many other reasons, we require a different theory of the task of managing people based on more adequate assumptions about human nature and human motivation. I am going to be so bold


The Human Side of Enterprise 187

as to suggest the broad dimensions of such a theory. Call it “Theory Y,” if you will.

1. Management is responsible for organizing the elements of productive enterprise—money, materials, equipment, people—in the interest of economic ends.

2. People are not by nature passive or resis-tant to organizational needs. They have become so as a result of experience in organizations.

3. The motivation, the potential for devel-opment, the capacity for assuming respon-sibility, the readiness to direct behavior toward organizational goals are all present in people. Management does not put them there. It is a responsibility of management to make it possible for people to recognize and develop these human characteristics for themselves.

4. The essential task of management is to arrange organizational conditions and methods of operation so that people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own efforts toward organizational objectives.

This is a process primarily of creating opportunities, releasing potential, remov-ing obstacles, encouraging growth, provid-ing guidance. It is what Peter Drucker has called “management by objectives” in con-trast to “management by control.” It does not involve the abdication of management, the absence of leadership, the lowering of standards, or the other characteristics usu-ally associated with the “soft” approach under Theory X.

SOME DIFFICULTIES

It is no more possible to create an organ-ization today which will be a full, effec-tive application of this theory than it was to build an atomic power plant in 1945. There are many formidable obstacles to overcome.

The conditions imposed by conventional organization theory and by the approach of scientifi c management for the past half century have tied men to limited jobs which do not utilize their capabilities, have

discouraged the acceptance of responsibil-ity, have encouraged passivity, have elimi-nated meaning from work. Man’s habits, attitudes, expectations—his whole concep-tion of membership in an industrial organ-ization—have been conditioned by his experience under these circumstances.

People today are accustomed to being directed, manipulated, controlled in indus-trial organizations and to fi nding satis-faction for their social, egoistic, and self-fulfi llment needs away from the job. This is true of much of management as well as of workers. Genuine “industrial citizenship”—to borrow again a term from Drucker—is a remote and unrealistic idea, the meaning of which has not even been considered by most members of industrial organizations.

Another way of saying this is that Theory X places exclusive reliance upon external control of human behavior, while Theory Y relies heavily on self-control and self-direction. It is worth noting that this difference is the difference between treat-ing people as children and treating them as mature adults. After generations of the for-mer, we cannot expect to shift to the latter overnight.

STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Before we are overwhelmed by the obsta-cles, let us remember that the application of theory is always slow. Progress is usually achieved in small steps. Some innovative ideas which are entirely consistent with Theory Y are today being applied with some success.

Decentralization and DelegationThese are ways of freeing people from the too-close control of conventional organ-ization, giving them a degree of freedom to direct their own activities, to assume responsibility, and, importantly, to satisfy their egoistic needs. In this connection, the fl at organization of Sears, Roebuck and



Company provides an interesting example. It forces “management by objectives,” since it enlarges the number of people reporting to a manager until he cannot direct and control them in the conventional manner.

Job EnlargementThis concept, pioneered by I.B.M. and Detroit Edison, is quite consistent with Theory Y. It encourages the acceptance of responsibility at the bottom of the organiza-tion; it provides opportunities for satisfying social and egoistic needs. In fact, the reorg-anization of work at the factory level offers one of the more challenging opportunities for innovation consistent with Theory Y.

Participation and Consultative ManagementUnder proper conditions, participation and consultative management provide encour-agement to people to direct their creative energies toward organizational objectives, give them some voice in decisions that affect them, provide signifi cant opportuni-ties for the satisfaction of social and egoistic needs. . . .

Performance AppraisalEven a cursory examination of conven-tional programs of performance appraisal within the ranks of management will reveal how completely consistent they are with Theory X. In fact, most such programs tend to treat the individual as though he were a product under inspection on the assembly line.

A few companies—among them General Mills, Ansul Chemical, and General Electric—have been experimenting with approaches which involve the individual in setting “targets” or objectives for him-self and in a self-evaluation of performance semi-annually or annually. Of course, the superior plays an important leadership role in this process—one, in fact, which

demands substantially more competence than the conventional approach. The role is, however, considerably more congenial to many managers than the role of “judge” or “inspector” which is usually forced upon them. Above all, the individual is encour-aged to take a greater responsibility for planning and appraising his own contribu-tion to organizational objectives; and the accompanying effects on egoistic and self-fulfi llment needs are substantial.

APPLYING THE IDEAS

The not infrequent failure of such ideas as these to work as well as expected is often attributable to the fact that a manage-ment has “bought the idea” but applied it within the framework of Theory X and its assumptions.

Delegation is not an effective way of exercising management by control. Par-ticipation becomes a farce when it is applied as a sales gimmick or a device for kidding people into thinking they are important. Only the management that has confi dence in human capacities and is itself directed toward organ izational objectives rather than toward the preservation of personal power can grasp the implications of this emerging theory. Such management will fi nd and apply successfully other innova-tive ideas as we move slowly toward the full implementation of a theory like Y.

THE HUMAN SIDE OF ENTERPRISE

. . . The ingenuity and the perseverance of industrial management in the pursuit of economic ends have changed many scien-tifi c and technological dreams into com-monplace realities. It is now becoming clear that the application of these same talents to the human side of enterprise will not only enhance substantially these materialistic achievements, but will bring us one step closer to “the good society.”


189

Psychology Today 5 (November 1971): 43–44, 46–74–76. © 1971 Sussex Publishers, Inc. Reprinted with permis-sion of Psychology Today.

“How could we have been so stupid?” President John F. Kennedy asked after he and a close group of advisers had blundered into the Bay of Pigs invasion. For the last two years I have been studying that question, as it applies not only to the Bay of Pigs deci-sion-makers but also to those who led the United States into such other major fi ascoes as the failure to be prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Korean War stalemate and the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Stupidity certainly is not the explanation. The men who participated in making the Bay of Pigs decision, for instance, comprised one of the greatest arrays of intellectual talent in the history of American Government—Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Douglas Dillon, Robert Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Allen Dulles and others.

It also seemed to me that explanations were incomplete if they concentrated only on disturbances in the behavior of each individual within a decision-making body: temporary emotional states of elation, fear, or anger that reduce a man’s mental effi -ciency, for example, or chronic blind spots arising from a man’s social prejudices or idiosyncratic biases.

I preferred to broaden the picture by looking at the fi ascoes from the standpoint of group dynamics as it has been explored over the past three decades, fi rst by the great social psychologist Kurt Lewin and later in many experimental situations by myself and other behavioral scientists. My

conclusion after poring over hundreds of relevant documents—historical reports about formal group meetings and informal conversations among the members—is that the groups that committed the fi ascoes were victims of what I call “groupthink.”

Groupy. In each case study, I was sur-prised to discover the extent to which each group displayed the typical phenomena of social conformity that are regularly encoun-tered in studies of group dynamics among ordinary citizens. For example, some of the phenomena appear to be completely in line with fi ndings from social-psycho-logical experiments showing that powerful social pressures are brought to bear by the members of a cohesive group whenever a dissident begins to voice his objections to a group consensus. Other phenomena are reminiscent of the shared illusions observed in encounter groups and friendship cliques when the members simultaneously reach a peak of “groupy” feelings.

Above all, there are numerous indica-tions pointing to the development of group norms that bolster morale at the expense of critical thinking. One of the most com-mon norms appears to be that of remain-ing loyal to the group by sticking with the policies to which the group has already committed itself, even when those policies are obviously working out badly and have unintended consequences that disturb the conscience of each member. This is one of the key characteristics of groupthink.

18Groupthink: The Desperate Drive for Consensus at Any CostIrving L. Janis



1984. I use the term groupthink as a quick and easy way to refer to the mode of thinking that persons engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive ingroup that it tends to over-ride realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. Groupthink is a term of the same order as the words in the newspeak vocabu-lary George Orwell used in his dismaying world of 1984. In that context, groupthink takes on an invidious connotation. Exactly such a connotation is intended, since the term refers to a deterioration in mental effi -ciency, reality testing and moral judgments as a result of group pressures.

The symptoms of groupthink arise when the members of decision-making groups become motivated to avoid being too harsh in their judgments of their leaders’ or their colleagues’ ideas. They adopt a soft line of criticism, even in their own thinking. At their meetings, all the members are ami-able and seek complete concurrence on every important issue, with no bickering or confl ict to spoil the cozy, “we-feeling” atmosphere.

Kill. Paradoxically, soft-headed groups are often hard-hearted when it comes to dealing with outgroups or enemies. They fi nd it relatively easy to resort to dehuman-izing solutions—they will readily authorize bombing attacks that kill large numbers of civilians in the name of the noble cause of persuading an unfriendly government to negotiate at the peace table. They are unlikely to pursue the more diffi cult and controversial issues that arise when alterna-tives to a harsh military solution come up for discussion. Nor are they inclined to raise ethical issues that carry the implication that this fi ne group of ours, with its humanitarianism and its high-minded principles, might be capable of adopting a course of action that is inhumane and immoral.

Norms. There is evidence from a num-ber of social-psychological studies that as the members of a group feel more accepted by the others, which is a central feature of

increased group cohesiveness, they display less overt conformity to group norms. Thus we would expect that the more cohesive a group becomes, the less the members will feel constrained to censor what they say out of fear of being socially punished for antagonizing the leader or any of their fel-low members.

In contrast, the groupthink type of confor-mity tends to increase as group cohesiveness increases. Groupthink involves non-delib-erate suppression of critical thoughts as a result of internalization of the group’s norms, which is quite different from deliberate sup-pression on the basis of external threats of social punishment. The more cohesive the group, the greater the inner compulsion on the part of each member to avoid creating disunity, which inclines him to believe in the soundness of whatever proposals are pro-moted by the leader or by a majority of the group’s members.

In a cohesive group, the danger is not so much that each individual will fail to reveal his objections to what the others propose but that he will think the proposal is a good one, without attempting to carry out a careful, critical scrutiny of the pros and cons of the alternatives. When groupthink becomes dominant, there also is consider-able suppression of deviant thoughts, but it takes the form of each person’s deciding that his misgivings are not relevant and should be set aside, that the benefi t of the doubt regarding any lingering uncertainties should be given to the group consensus.

Stress. I do not mean to imply that all cohesive groups necessarily suffer from groupthink. All ingroups may have a mild tendency toward groupthink, displaying one or another of the symptoms from time to time, but it need not be so dominant as to infl uence the quality of the group’s fi nal decision. Neither do I mean to imply that there is anything necessarily ineffi cient or harmful about group decisions in general. On the contrary, a group whose members have properly defi ned roles, with tradi-tions concerning the procedures to follow


Groupthink: The Desperate Drive for Consensus at Any Cost 191

in pursuing a critical inquiry, probably is capable of making better decisions than any individual group member working alone.

The problem is that the advantages of having decisions made by groups are often lost because of powerful psychological pres-sures that arise when the members work closely together, share the same set of val-ues and, above all, face a crisis situation that puts everyone under intense stress.

The main principle of groupthink, which I offer in the spirit of Parkinson’s Law, is this: The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making in-group, the greater the danger that inde-pendent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irratio-nal and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups.

Symptoms. In my studies of high-level governmental decision-makers, both civil-ian and military, I have found eight main symptoms of groupthink.

1. Invulnerability. Most or all of the members of the ingroup share an illusion of invulnerability that provides for them some degree of reassurance about obvious dangers and leads them to become over-optimistic and willing to take extraordinary risks. It also causes them to fail to respond to clear warnings of danger.

The Kennedy ingroup, which uncritically accepted the Central Intelligence Agency’s disastrous Bay of Pigs plan, operated on the false assumption that they could keep secret the fact that the United States was respon-sible for the invasion of Cuba. Even after news of the plan began to leak out, their belief remained unshaken. They failed even to consider the danger that awaited them: a worldwide revulsion against the U.S.

A similar attitude appeared among the members of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ingroup, the “Tuesday Cabinet,” which kept escalating the Vietnam War despite repeated setbacks and failures. “There was a belief,” Bill Moyers commented after he resigned, “that if we indicated a willingness to use our power, they [the North Vietnamese] would

get the message and back away from an all-out confrontation. . . . There was a con-fi dence—it was never bragged about, it was just there—that when the chips were really down, the other people would fold.”

A most poignant example of an illusion of invulnerability involves the ingroup around Admiral H. E. Kimmel, which failed to pre-pare for the possibility of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor despite repeated warnings. Informed by his intelligence chief that radio contact with Japanese aircraft carriers had been lost, Kimmel joked about it: “What, you don’t know where the carriers are? Do you mean to say that they could be round-ing Diamond Head (at Honolulu) and you wouldn’t know it?” The carriers were in fact moving full-steam toward Kimmel’s com-mand post at the time. Laughing together about a danger signal, which labels it as a purely laughing matter, is a characteristic manifestation of groupthink.

2. Rationale. As we see, victims of group-think ignore warnings; they also collectively construct rationalizations in order to discount warnings and other forms of negative feedback that, taken seriously, might lead the group members to reconsider their assumptions each time they recom-mit themselves to past decisions. Why did the Johnson ingroup avoid reconsidering its escalation policy when time and again the expectations on which they based their decisions turned out to be wrong? James C. Thomson, Jr., a Harvard historian who spent fi ve years as an observing partici-pant in both the State Department and the White House, tells us that the policy-makers avoided critical discussion of their prior decisions and continually invented new rationalizations so that they could sin-cerely recommit themselves to defeating the North Vietnamese.

In the fall of 1964, before the bombing of North Vietnam began, some of the policy-makers predicted that six weeks of air strikes would induce the North Vietnamese to seek peace talks. When someone asked, “What if they don’t?” the answer was that another four weeks certainly would do the trick. . . .



3. Morality. Victims of groupthink believe unquestioningly in the inher-ent morality of their ingroup; this belief inclines the members to ignore the ethical or moral conse quences of their decisions.

Evidence that this symptom is at work usually is of a negative kind—the things that are left unsaid in group meetings. At least two infl uential persons had doubts about the morality of the Bay of Pigs adven-ture. One of them, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., presented his strong objections in a memorandum to President Kennedy and Secretary of State Rusk but suppressed them when he attended meetings of the Kennedy team. The other, Senator J. William Fulbright, was not a member of the group, but the President invited him to express his misgivings in a speech to the policymakers. However, when Fulbright fi nished speaking the President moved on to other agenda items without asking for reactions of the group.

David Kraslow and Stuart H. Loory, in The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam, report that during 1966 President Johnson’s ingroup was concerned primarily with selecting bomb targets in North Vietnam. They based their selections on four fac-tors—the military advantage, the risk to American aircraft and pilots, the danger of forcing other countries into the fi ghting, and the danger of heavy civilian casual-ties. At their regular Tuesday luncheons, they weighed these factors the way school teachers grade examination papers, aver-aging them out. Though evidence on this point is scant, I suspect that the group’s ritualistic adherence to a standardized procedure induced the members to feel morally justifi ed in their destructive way of dealing with the Vietnamese people—after all, the danger of heavy civilian casu-alties from U.S. air strikes was taken into account on their checklists.

4. Stereotypes. Victims of groupthink hold stereotyped views of the leaders of enemy groups: they are so evil that genu-ine attempts at negotiating differences with them are unwarranted, or they are too weak

or too stupid to deal effectively with what-ever attempts the ingroup makes to defeat their purposes, no matter how risky the attempts are.

Kennedy’s groupthinkers believed that Premier Fidel Castro’s air force was so inef-fectual that obsolete B-26’s could knock it out completely in a surprise attack before the invasion began. They also believed that Castro’s army was so weak that a small Cuban-exile brigade could establish a well-protected beachhead at the Bay of Pigs. In addition, they believed that Castro was not smart enough to put down any possible internal uprisings in support of the exiles. They were wrong on all three assumptions. Though much of the blame was attributable to faulty intelligence, the point is that none of Kennedy’s advisers even questioned the CIA planners about these assumptions.

The Johnson advisers’ sloganistic think-ing about “the Communist apparatus” that was “working all around the world” (as Dean Rusk put it) led them to over-look the powerful nationalistic strivings of the North Vietnamese government and its efforts to ward off Chinese domina-tion. The crudest of all stereotypes used by Johnson’s inner circle to justify their poli-cies was the domino theory (“If we don’t stop the Reds in South Vietnam, tomorrow they will be in Hawaii and next week they will be in San Francisco,” Johnson once said). The group so fi rmly accepted this stereotype that it became almost impos-sible for any adviser to introduce a more sophisticated viewpoint.

In the documents on Pearl Harbor, it is clear to see that the Navy commanders stationed in Hawaii had a naive image of Japan as a midget that would not dare to strike a blow against a powerful giant.

5. Pressure. Victims of groupthink apply direct pressure to any individual who momen-tarily expresses doubts about any of the group’s shared illusions or who questions the validity of the arguments supporting a policy alternative favored by the majority. This gambit reinforces the concurrence-seeking



norm that loyal members are expected to maintain.

President Kennedy probably was more active than anyone else in raising skepti-cal questions during the Bay of Pigs meet-ings, and yet he seems to have encouraged the group’s docile, uncritical acceptance of defective arguments in favor of the CIA’s plan. At every meeting, he allowed the CIA representatives to dominate the discussion. He permitted them to give their immedi-ate refutations in response to each tenta-tive doubt that one of the others expressed, instead of asking whether anyone shared the doubt or wanted to pursue the implications of the new worrisome issue that had just been raised. And at the most crucial meet-ing, when he was calling on each member to give his vote for or against the plan, he did not call on Arthur Schlesinger, the one man there who was known by the President to have serious misgivings.

Historian Thomson informs us that whenever a member of Johnson’s ingroup began to express doubts, the group used subtle social pressures to “domesticate” him. To start with, the dissenter was made to feel at home provided that he lived up to two restrictions: 1) that he did not voice his doubts to outsiders, which would play into the hands of the opposition; and 2) that he kept his criticisms within the bounds of acceptable deviation, which meant not challenging any of the fundamental assumptions that went into the group’s prior commitments. One such “domesti-cated dissenter” was Bill Moyers. When Moyers arrived at a meeting, Thomson tells us, the President greeted him with, “Well, here comes Mr. Stop-the-Bombing.”

6. Self-Censorship. Victims of group-think avoid deviating from what appears to be group consensus; they keep silent about their misgivings and even minimize to themselves the importance of their doubts.

As we have seen, Schlesinger was not at all hesitant about presenting his strong objections to the Bay of Pigs plan in a mem-orandum to the President and the Secretary of State. But he became keenly aware of

his tendency to suppress objections at the White House meetings. “In the months after the Bay of Pigs, I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the cabinet room,” Schlesinger writes in A Thousand Days, “I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one’s impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circum-stances of the discussion.”

7. Unanimity. Victims of groupthink share an illusion of unanimity within the group concerning almost all judgments expressed by members who speak in favor of the majority view. This symptom results partly from the preceding one, whose effects are augmented by the false assumption that any individual who remains silent during any part of the discussion is in full accord with what the others are saying.

When a group of persons who respect each other’s opinions arrives at a unani-mous view, each member is likely to feel that the belief must be true. This reliance on consensual validation within the group tends to replace individual critical think-ing and reality testing, unless there are clear-cut disagreements among the mem-bers. In contemplating a course of action such as the invasion of Cuba, it is pain-ful for the members to confront disagree-ments within their group, particularly if it becomes apparent that there are widely divergent views about whether the pre-ferred course of action is too risky to under-take at all. Such disagreements are likely to arouse anxieties about making a seri-ous error. Once the sense of unanimity is shattered, the members no longer can feel complacently confi dent about the decision they are inclined to make. Each man must then face the annoying realization that there are troublesome uncertainties and he must diligently seek out the best informa-tion he can get in order to decide for him-self exactly how serious the risks might be. This is one of the unpleasant consequences of being in a group of hardheaded, critical thinkers.



To avoid such an unpleasant state, the members often become inclined, without quite realizing it, to prevent latent dis-agreements from surfacing when they are about to initiate a risky course of action. The group leader and the members support each other in playing up the areas of con-vergence in their thinking, at the expense of fully exploring divergencies that might reveal unsettled issues. . . .

8. Mindguards. Victims of groupthink sometimes appoint themselves as mind-guards to protect the leader and fellow members from adverse information that might break the complacency they shared about the effectiveness and morality of past decisions. At a large birthday party for his wife, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who had been constantly informed about the Cuban invasion plan, took Schlesinger aside and asked him why he was opposed. Kennedy listened coldly and said, “You may be right or you may be wrong, but the President has made his mind up. Don’t push it any further. Now is the time for everyone to help him all they can.”

Rusk also functioned as a highly effec-tive mindguard by failing to transmit to the group the strong objections of three “outsid-ers” who had learned of the invasion plan—Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, USIA Director Edward R. Murrow, and Rusk’s intelligence chief, Roger Hilsman. Had Rusk done so, their warnings might have reinforced Schlesinger’s memoran-dum and jolted some of Kennedy’s ingroup, if not the President himself, into reconsid-ering the decision.

Products. When a group of executives frequently displays most or all of these inter-related symptoms, a detailed study of their deliberations is likely to reveal a number of immediate consequences. These conse-quences are, in effect, products of poor deci-sion-making practices because they lead to inadequate solutions to the problems under discussion.

First, the group limits its discussions to a few alternative courses of action (often

only two) without an initial survey of all the alternatives that might be worthy of consideration.

Second, the group fails to reexamine the course of action initially preferred by the majority after they learn of risks and draw-backs they had not considered originally.

Third, the members spend little or no time discussing whether there are nonob-vious gains they may have overlooked or ways of reducing the seemingly prohibitive costs that made rejected alternatives appear undesirable to them.

Fourth, members make little or no attempt to obtain information from experts within their own organizations who might be able to supply more precise estimates of potential losses and gains.

Fifth, members show positive interest in facts and opinions that support their pre-ferred policy, and they tend to ignore facts and opinions that do not.

Sixth, members spend little time delib-erating about how the chosen policy might be hindered by bureaucratic inertia, sabotaged by political opponents, or tem-porarily derailed by common accidents. Consequently, they fail to work out con-tingency plans to cope with foreseeable setbacks that could endanger the overall success of their chosen course.

Support. The search for an explanation of why groupthink occurs has led me through a quagmire of complicated theoretical issues in the murky area of human motivation. My belief, based on recent social psychological research, is that we can best understand the various symptoms of group-think as a mutual effort among the group members to maintain self-esteem and emotional equa-nimity by providing social support to each other, especially at times when they share responsibility for making vital decisions.

Even when no important decision is pending, the typical administrator will begin to doubt the wisdom and morality of his past decisions each time he receives information about setbacks, particularly if the information is accompanied by



negative feedback from prominent men who originally had been his supporters. It should not be surprising, therefore, to fi nd that individual members strive to develop unanimity and esprit de corps that will help bolster each other’s morale, to create an optimistic outlook about the success of pending decisions, and to reaffi rm the posi-tive value of past policies to which all of them are committed.

Pride. Shared illusions of invulnerabil-ity, for example, can reduce anxiety about taking risks. Rationalizations help members believe that the risks are really not so bad after all. The assumption of inherent moral-ity helps the members to avoid feelings of shame or guilt. Negative stereotypes func-tion as stress-reducing devices to enhance a sense of moral righteousness as well as pride in a lofty mission.

The mutual enhancement of self-esteem and morale may have functional value in enabling the members to maintain their capacity to take action, but it has maladap-tive consequences insofar as concurrence-seeking tendencies interfere with critical, rational capacities and lead to serious errors of judgment.

While I have limited my study to deci-sion-making bodies in government, group-think symptoms appear in business, industry and any other fi eld where small, cohesive groups make the decisions. It is vital, then, for all sorts of people—and especially group leaders—to know what steps they can take to prevent groupthink.

Remedies. To counterpoint my case studies of the major fi ascoes, I have also investigated two highly successful group enterprises, the formulation of the Marshall Plan in the Truman Administration and the handling of the Cuban missile crisis by President Kennedy and his advisers. I have found it instructive to examine the steps Kennedy took to change his group’s decision-making processes. These changes ensured that the mistakes made by his Bay of Pigs ingroup were not repeated by

the missile-crisis ingroup, even though the membership of both groups was essentially the same.

The following recommendations for pre-venting groupthink incorporate many of the good practices I discovered to be char-acteristic of the Marshall Plan and missile crisis groups:

1. The leader of a policy-forming group should assign the role of critical evaluator to each member, encouraging the group to give high priority to open airing of objec-tions and doubts. This practice needs to be reinforced by the leader’s acceptance of criticism of his own judgments in order to discourage members from soft-pedaling their disagreements and from allowing their striving for concurrence to inhibit critical thinking.

2. When the key members of a hierarchy assign a policy-planning mission to any group within their organization, they should adopt an impartial stance instead of stating preferences and expectations at the beginning. This will encourage open inquiry and impartial probing of a wide range of policy alternatives.

3. The organization routinely should set up several outside policy-planning and evalu-ation groups to work on the same policy question, each deliberating under a differ-ent leader. This can prevent the insula-tion of an ingroup.

4. At intervals before the group reaches a fi nal consensus, the leader should require each member to discuss the group’s delib-erations with associates in his own unit of the organization—assuming that those associates can be trusted to adhere to the same security regulations that govern the policy-makers—and then to report back their reactions to the group.

5. The group should invite one or more out-side experts to each meeting on a stag-gered basis and encourage the experts to challenge the views of the core members.

6. At every general meeting of the group, whenever the agenda calls for an evalu-ation of policy alternatives, at least one member should play devil’s advocate, functioning as a good lawyer in challeng-ing the testimony of those who advocate the majority position.



7. Whenever the policy issue involves rela-tions with a rival nation or organization, the group should devote a sizable block of time, perhaps an entire session, to a survey of all warning signals from the rivals and should write alternative scenarios on the rivals’ intentions.

8. When the group is surveying policy alter-natives for feasibility and effectiveness, it should from time to time divide into two or more subgroups to meet separately, un-der different chairmen, and then come back together to hammer out differences.

9. After reaching a preliminary consensus about what seems to be the best policy, the group should hold a “second-chance” meeting at which every member expresses as vividly as he can all his residual doubts, and rethinks the entire issue before mak-ing a defi nitive choice.

How. These recommendations have their disadvantages. To encourage the open air-ing of objections, for instance, might lead to prolonged and costly debates when a rapidly growing crisis requires immediate solution. It also could cause rejection, depression and anger. A leader’s failure to set a norm might

create cleavage between leader and members that could develop into a disruptive power struggle if the leader looks on the emerging consensus as anathema. Setting up outside evaluation groups might increase the risk of security leakage. Still, inventive executives who know their way around the organiza-tional maze probably can fi gure out how to apply one or another of the prescriptions suc-cessfully, without harmful side effects.

They also could benefi t from the advice of outside experts in the administrative and behavioral sciences. Though these experts have much to offer, they have had few chances to work on policy-making machin-ery within large organizations. As matters now stand, executives innovate only when they need new procedures to avoid repeat-ing serious errors that have defl ated their self-images.

In this era of atomic warheads, urban dis-organization and ecocatastrophes, it seems to me that policymakers should collabo-rate with behavioral scientists and give top priority to preventing groupthink and its attendant fi ascoes.


human resource theory, or the organizational behavior ... · our basic assumptions about the...

Documents