At the third level, a form of managerial control is dictated by the power ethic that recent literature has called Theory X. A system of control which prescribes that managerially determined ends and means are proper and that it is necessary to accomplish organizational goals through coercion and threat because the masses are inherently against work and are weak and afraid. This I call Directive Management.

The Directive Manager sees himself as superior to and as the organizer of the productive energies present in lesser men. He engineers human behavior. He is amazingly successful when he is a good organizer and when the values of the working group are congruent with his Might is Right values, when the working group is at the level of frightened existence. Constrictive values make sense with Machiavellian ethics when the goal is to organize human effort toward the end that some leader prescribes. Thus, we hypothesize here that in an embryonic and developing industrial or political organization that it is dissimilar but congruent values that make for organization viability. But soon a devastating thing occurs, devastating that is to he who behaves by Theory X, who believes in "The Prerogatives of Management," who believes in management by direction.

Successful Directive Management in an industrial setting improves the lot of the workers. To achieve his end the Directive Manager must train his people and such training increases their competence. Their competence in turn improves their living circumstances and this results in more energy freed in their system. This enables them to question their directed existence and leads to the insight of organizing to fight the power of their Directive Managers. Thus the workers themselves move to the third level and begin to operate within the power ethic.

When the managed in a Directive organization begin to operate by the power ethic a long period of organizational instability is ushered in. In many such instances the vitality of the company is seriously threatened. We saw this, for example, in Ford in the thirties. If management remains at the third level when the workers move from second to third, we have again a situation in which the values of the managing and the managed are similar, but this time the similarity of values is not congruent. The managers threatened with the loss of their power fixate and try to counter the power move of the managed by over-systematizing that which is but moderately systematizable and by refining their measures of that which to date is not measurable. And the workers counter with all that their new felt power can do.

Some third level managers, too many of them, try to copy what has been successful in other organizations where the managed begin to operate by the power ethic. They try to use Participative Managerial techniques but the attempt aborts because Directive Managers can never truly allow participation.

Thus they soon induce hate - which is the one thing a Directive Manager must avoid because hate ultimately consumes the vitality of any organism or organization in which it arises. But other managers meet threat to their power by questioning their Might is Right way and begin their movement to the fourth level of existence.

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