Page 225 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 12 ■ Diagnosing change
‘Social man’

These assumptions may be listed as follows:
1 People are basically motivated by social needs and achieve a sense of identity
through relationships with others.
2 The rationalization of work processes has removed the meaning from work and
meaning must thus be sought from social relationships while doing the job.
3 The peer group, with its social pressures, elicits more response from the
employee than the incentives and controls of management.
4 For people to respond to management the supervisor must meet the individ-
ual’s social needs and needs for acceptance.
In the work design area this set of assumptions leads to a major change in
approach. The manager should not direct attention solely to task efficiency but
should consider employees’ social needs. The manager should accept social inter-
action as a means of improving motivation, rather than as something which
interferes with efficient performance, and should regard work groups as being an
essential and contributory factor to employee motivation rather than as being a
disruptive influence.
The assumptions about ‘social man’ lead to two related, though rather differ-
ent, emphases. The first of these is an emphasis on human relations. The man-
ager, instead of being a controller and creator of work, becomes a sympathetic
supporter of the employee and enables him or her to do the job rather than
ensuring that it is done by direct means. This leads to the need to adopt less auto-
cratic/directive and more supportive management styles. The second is the socio-
technical systems approach. Here a deliberate effort is made to integrate the
social needs of the employees and the technical needs of the job, usually by
designing work for groups of employees rather than individuals, and often by
using group rather than individual incentives.

‘Self-actualizing man’

These assumptions about people can be summarized as follows:
1 People are not inherently lazy or resistant to organizational goals.
2 People seek to be, and are capable of being, mature on the job exercising a cer-
tain amount of autonomy, independence and responsibility, and developing
skills and adaptability.
3 People are primarily self-motivated and self-controlled and do not need exter-
nal incentives and controls to make them work.
4 There is no inherent conflict between self-actualization and effective organi-
zational performance. Given the opportunity, people will voluntarily integrate
their own goals with those of the organization, achieving the former through
working towards the latter.
The implications of these assumptions for management are fundamentally dif-
ferent from the earlier two. Both rational–economic and social assumptions lead

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