He asked managers one question that split the profession in two.
In 1960, Douglas McGregor, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, published The Human Side of Enterprise with a deceptively simple opening question: "What are your assumptions, implicit as well as explicit, about the most effective way to manage people?"1
McGregor proposed that the answer split into two categories. Theory X assumed that workers were inherently lazy, required constant supervision, and could only be motivated through external rewards and punishments. Theory Y assumed that workers were self-motivated, sought responsibility, and could be trusted to direct their own efforts toward organizational goals.2
McGregor was born in Detroit on September 6, 1906. He worked with his grandfather's McGregor Institute, a transient shelter for homeless men, before attending Wayne State University and later earning his Ph.D. at Harvard.3 He served as president of Antioch College from 1948 to 1954 before joining MIT, where he became a founding faculty member of the Sloan School.4
He was a student of Abraham Maslow, whose hierarchy of needs influenced Theory Y's assumption that workers sought meaning and self-actualization, not merely wages.
The book was voted the fourth most influential management book of the twentieth century by the Fellows of the Academy of Management.5 Warren Bennis, a leadership scholar, said of McGregor, "Just as every economist, knowingly or not, pays his dues to Keynes, we are all, one way or another, disciples of McGregor."6
McGregor himself warned against treating Theory Y as a rigid doctrine. Edgar Schein, a colleague at MIT, noted that McGregor was "discouraged by the degree to which Theory Y had become as monolithic a set of principles as those of Theory X."7 McGregor died on October 1, 1964, at the age of fifty-eight.