1.2.2 Theory X and Y managers
Likert as much as any management theorist typifies the Behavioural Approach, but perhaps Douglas McGregor's Theory Y (1960) entrenched the approach in organisational and leadership practice. Essentially, McGregor observed there were two diametrically held assumptions that infiltrated management practice. Managers, he theorised, display behaviours derived from one or the other set of assumptions. The first set of assumptions he called Theory X: 1. The average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can... 2. Because of this human characteristic of dislike of work, most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort toward the achievement of organisational objectives... 3. The average human being prefers to be directed, wishes to avoid responsibility, has relatively little ambition, wants security above all." (McGregor, 1960:33-34)

The second set of assumptions he called Theory Y: 1. The expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest... 2. External control and threat of punishment are not the only means for bringing about effort toward organisational objectives. Man will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which he is committed. 3. Commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards associated with their achievement... 4. The average human being learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept but to seek responsibility... 5. The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity and creativity in the solution of organisational problems is widely, not narrowly distributed in the population. 6. Under the conditions of modern industrial life, the intellectual potentialities of the average human being are