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Douglas McGregor, Revisited: Managing the Human Side of the Enterprise
By Gary Heil, Warren Bennis, and Deborah C. Stephens. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. 196 pages, hard cover, $27.95.
Reviewed by Eileen P. Kelly, Ithaca College
Douglas Murray McGregor left an indelible impression on the American business landscape and on management thought with his Theory X and Theory Y. A generation of behavioral and leadership scholars such as Warren Bennis, Edgar Schein, Rensis Likert, Robert Blake, Jane Mouton, and Chris Argyris are indebted to his work. McGregor was chairman of the Department of Industrial Management at MIT and still deeply involved in developing his theories of motivation when he died in 1964 at the age of 58.
The dawn of the 21st century offers an opportunity to reexamine the McGregor's work. This is precisely what Gary Heil, Warren Bennis, and Deborah C. Stephens accomplish in Douglas McGregor, Revisited: Managing the Human Side of the Enterprise. The authors are particularly well-suited to this task. Gary Heil and Deborah Stephens are cofounders of the California-based Center for Creative Leadership. Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business at the University of Southern California, was a close friend and colleague of McGregor's. He first met McGregor in the 1950s, when McGregor was president of Antioch College and Bennis was an undergraduate student there. Bennis, who also worked with Abraham Maslow, would eventually edit two books of McGregor's works posthumously. Notably, much of McGregor's philosophy was greatly influenced by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In turn, Maslow himself was an ardent enthusiast of Theory Y, which he saw as consistent with the higher levels of his needs hierarchy.
Douglas McGregor, Revisited consists of two parts. The first part poses the question: why does McGregor matter? The authors respond by examining the relevance of McGregor's work to the contemporary business environment. This section also...