"How Should Who Lead Whom to do What?"

by Dr. Clare Graves

YMCA
Management Forum 1971-1972

From the Historical Collection of the work of Dr. Clare W. Graves
- presentations, papers, recorded transcripts, notes-
William R. Lee                                                                                                                      August 2003

It is to chase the will-of-the-wisp because if you ruminate for a moment as to your motivating experience, or if you examine carefully the literature on organizing for productivity you cannot help but see the interesting matters that I have brought to your attention.

Is it not your experience that no matter the motivational methodology used to activate better production the result is always that the methodology works positively on some people, negatively on others and has little or no effect on the rest? Is this not what we have seen in what has so far been presented? But please don’t misunderstand me. I have no argument with financial incentives – where they apply. I do not quarrel with Likert’s participatory management – where it is appropriate. I do not disparage management by objectives so long as it is used with the right people. Nor do I argue against Theory Y’s management by integration, when what the people want, is to be integrated, nor with Herzberg’s job enlargement if a person wants and enlarged job. I don’t even argue against sensitivity training for what it can do. But I do say than anyone of these alone has little to do with motivating productivity. What I argue against is selling these motivational concepts as if they were the answer to the question of how do you motivate people.

As long as we ask this question, as long as we seek the answer to it we are just going to jump from one motivational panacea to another, from one motivational gimmick to the next. We will jump form the use of force and threat, to the use of the carrot and the stick, from the carrot and the stuck to positive financial incentives, from positive financial incentives to participation, from participation to group dynamics and sensitivity training, from sensitivity training to management by integration, from management by integration to job enlargement and from job enlargement to management by objectives. Then, in time, when each motivational methodology fails the test we will go back to threat and force- a movement well represented in recent legislative acts. And each time we give up on the latest methodological answer to the irrelevant question, we will tend to overlook two most meaningful phenomena, meaningful that is, so far as the problem of organizing for productivity is concerned.

Each time we switch from one motivational system to another, one thing happens to managers, another happens to their subordinates. Some managers who were happy with and could use the old method were unhappy with and tend to misuse the new. Some managers who were previously unhappy with and could not effectively use the old method are happier with and can more effectively use its replacement. But never, no matter what the motivational method, are all managers happy with it or able to use it effectively.

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