by Douglas Neal The surprising thing about the new technologies that Ed Luczak described in his article is that they are being adopted by business even though they are consumer products. However, this is more than just adding a new source of supply to current procurement practices.

The consumerization of IT means it is no longer unusual for employees to have better equipment at home than they have at work. Increasingly this means not just better desktops or PDAs, but also digital cameras, digital video recorders, digital TVs, hand-held digital media players, and digital phones. Using these devices and associated network technologies has made people much more knowledgeable about the IT they use at work.

The rise of the IT-savvy employee creates huge opportunities for business. It’s also a huge challenge to IT departments. To take advantage of those business opportunities, IT departments will have to abandon their top-down, one-size-fits-all way of dealing with employees.

From Theory X to Theory Y

IT departments have traditionally thought they had to dictate exactly where, how, and how fast users can travel down the information highway. They saw the possibility of bad things happening and responded with rules to ensure that they did not. This approach was in line with the strongly held belief of most senior executives that top-down control was the only way to run an organization.

This attitude was challenged in 1960 by Douglas McGregor, who asserted that this authoritarian approach was only one of several forms of control. He postulated two theories to show the contrast between how organizations currently think about their employees and how they might want to relate to them.

Theory X captured the essence of the authoritarian approach. The premises of Theory X begin with the notion that people have an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if they can. From that premise, it follows that people must be coerced, controlled, and directed to get them to put forward the effort needed to meet the organization’s ends. The conclusion is that top-down control is appropriate for all purposes and circumstances.

Employees have a very different motivation under McGregor’s Theory Y. The premises of Theory Y begin with the notion that the expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as in play. It follows that the capacity to come up with solutions to problems is widely distributed in the population and that most people will not only accept but seek responsibility for creating those solutions. Top-down controls are not only not appropriate for all circumstances, but can actually hinder organizational goals by blocking employee development.

As the world changes from an industrial age to a services age, Theory X becomes less tenable. It applies to fewer areas of business and is less effective in the areas where it is still applied.

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