Читать книгу Foundations of management - Juan Antonio Pérez López - Страница 23

In McGregor's view, motivation to perform an action is the result of the search for both the extrinsic consequences of the action (incentives that “someone else” has attached to that action) and the intrinsic consequences that follow from the performance itself of the action. For McGregor, the factors that intrinsically motivate the performance of a task are properties of a human system and represent potential strength not present in mechanical systems. We will now explore what this “potential strength” may consist of.

One of our first observations is that when a person interacts with others, his action has different types of results or consequences. Each of these may constitute a powerful source of motivation, that is, each may be directly sought by the person who acts, and, consequently, may serve as a motive to perform the action.

However, a person may well perform the action seeking i only one, or a few, of these results. Obviously, this will not mean that he does not obtain the other results as well. It is precisely for this reason that we must introduce the notion of the correctness of an action plan. We call an action plan correct only when the consequences that have not been directly sought by the decision-maker do not entail unsought consequences that create a new problem more serious than the one solved by the implementation of the plan.

All the possible results of the implementation of an action plan can be synthesized into three categories or types, all irreducible to one another. In order to see why this is so, and to identify the results which correspond to each of these categories, one need only observe that we can conceive of human action as a process of interaction (action and reaction) with an environment which, in general, will also be human (that is, made up of other people). The schematic conceptualization of this interaction is shown in Fig. 3.