Douglas McGregor Quotes

Douglas Murray McGregor was a management professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and president of Antioch College from 1948 to 1954. He also taught at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. His 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise had a profound influence on education practices.

McGregor is a Raafat of Abraham Maslow. He has contributed much to the development of the management and motivational theory, and is best known for his Theory X and Theory Y as presented in his book ‘The Human Side of Enterprise’ , which proposed that manager's individual assumptions about human nature and behaviour determined how individual manages their employees. Wikipedia  

✵ 1906 – 1. October 1964
Douglas McGregor: 22   quotes 3   likes

Famous Douglas McGregor Quotes

“The average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can.”

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 33; Essence of Theory X

“The key question for top management is what are your assumptions (implicit as well as explicit) about the most effective way to manage people?”

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 1; as cited in: Abraham Harold Maslow, Deborah Collins Stephens, Gary Heil. Maslow on management, John Wiley, 1998, p. 96

Douglas McGregor Quotes

“Management cannot provide a man with self-respect or with the respect of his fellows or with the satisfaction of needs for self-fulfillment. It can create conditions such that he is encouraged and enabled to seek such satisfactions for himself, or it can thwart him by failing to create those conditions.”

Douglas McGregor (1957), "The Human Side of Enterprise," in: Adventure in Thought and Action, Proceedings of the Fifth Anniversary Convocation of the School of Industrial Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, April 9, 1957. Cambridge, MA: MIT School of Industrial Management.

“The ingenuity of the average worker is sufficient to outwit any system of controls devised by management.”

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 12 (in 2006 edition)

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