Administrative Behaviour

What This Topic Asks

Administrative behaviour is the study of what people actually do inside organisations, as against what the organisation chart says they do. The classical writers described a structure and assumed the behaviour would follow; the human relations school showed that it does not. This topic collects the theories that grew in that gap: how decisions are really made, how information really moves, what really motivates people at work, and what leadership adds that authority cannot supply.

Decision Making

Decision making has been defined as "a conscious and human process, involving both individual and social phenomena, based upon factual and value premises, which concludes with a choice of one behavioural activity from among one or more alternatives with the intention of moving toward some state of affairs". Every element of that definition is doing work: the process is conscious, it is both individual and social, it rests on two kinds of premise, and it ends in a choice directed at a future state.

The Four Phases

• Explorative: searching for decision occasions, that is, recognising that a decision is required at all.
• Speculative: identifying the factors that bear on the decision problem.
• Evaluative: analysing and weighing alternative courses of action.
• Selective: choosing the course to follow.

Characteristics

• Goal-oriented. Decisions are made to achieve objectives, and in an organisation those are the organisation's objectives.
• Implies alternatives. A decision problem arises only where there are two or more courses open. With a single alternative there is no decision, only an action.
• Dynamic and situational. It involves a time dimension and a time lag, and the technique used varies with the type of problem and the time available to solve it.
• Environment-related. An executive may decide one way in one set of circumstances and differently in another.
• Continuous. Decision making is not an event in administration but the texture of it.

Chester Barnard on the Decision

Chester Barnard, in The Functions of the Executive (1938), set the terms Simon would formalise. For Barnard, decision making in the organisation is specialised by level: decisions at the upper levels have more to do with the ends of the organisation, and decisions at the lower levels with the means of achieving them.

His central device is the strategic factor. The decision-maker must distinguish facts relevant to the organisation's purpose from those that are irrelevant, which requires searching out the factor whose alteration would change the outcome. Barnard noted the difficulty honestly: technical methods for disclosing the strategic factors in the economic and social parts of the environment have had little attention, so the administrator must develop non-logical mental processes to make up the deficit. Intuition, in other words, is not a failure of method but a necessary supplement to it.

He described the opportunistic element of decision making as a chain of means and ends in which a purpose is defined, pursued to a more specific level, and then redefined, with each redefinition starting a new search for a strategic factor.

Barnard held that the decision process rests on three things: the purpose of the decision, whether to determine a course of action or to persuade; the speed required; and the quality of the information available, since precise information allows logical processes while uncertainty compels non-logical ones.

Authority and the Zone of Indifference

Barnard inverted the classical account of authority. Authority does not flow downward from position; it is conferred upward by acceptance. If subordinates are unable or unwilling to comply with an order it will be disobeyed or disregarded, so orders must respect the mental and physical capacity of those who receive them.

Arrange the orders a person might receive in order of their acceptability and they fall into three groups: those clearly unacceptable; those on the neutral line, just acceptable or just unacceptable; and those unquestionably acceptable. The last group lies within the zone of indifference, and orders falling inside it are obeyed without conscious question, whatever the nature of the authority behind them. The zone widens or narrows with the inducements the organisation offers against the burdens and sacrifices it demands.

Simon adopted the idea and renamed it the zone of acceptance. The practical importance for public administration is large: it means the effective authority of a superior is a variable maintained by the organisation's incentives, not a constant conferred by the rules.

Barnard: The Contribution-Satisfaction Equilibrium

Barnard's theory of organisation is at bottom a theory of why people keep contributing to it. A formal organisation exists when persons able to communicate are willing to contribute action to a common purpose, so communication, willingness to serve and common purpose are its three elements. Willingness is the fragile one. Each member weighs the inducements the organisation offers against the burdens and sacrifices it demands, and goes on contributing only while the inducements are at least equal to the contributions in his own estimation. The survival of the organisation therefore depends on an equilibrium between what it gives and what it receives, the contribution-satisfaction equilibrium.

Barnard's economy of incentives lists what the organisation can offer. Specific inducements, offered to particular persons, are material inducements, personal non-material opportunities such as distinction, prestige and power, desirable physical conditions of work, and ideal benefactions such as pride of workmanship and loyalty to a cause. General incentives are associational attractiveness, conditions of work suited to habitual methods and attitudes, the feeling of enlarged participation in events, and the condition of communion with colleagues. He held that material reward is weak beyond the level of subsistence and that non-material incentives carry most of the weight. Where incentives cannot be raised, the organisation must work on the other side of the balance through persuasion: coercion, the rationalisation of opportunity, and the inculcation of motives.

Effectiveness and Efficiency

• Effectiveness is the accomplishment of the cooperative purpose, which is social and non-personal. An organisation that cannot achieve its purpose disintegrates.
• Efficiency is the satisfaction of the individual motives of those who contribute. In Barnard's specialised sense it is the organisation's capacity to offer effective inducements in sufficient quantity to maintain the equilibrium of the system. An organisation that achieves its purpose while dissatisfying its members is effective but inefficient, and it will not survive, because the contributions on which it depends will be withdrawn.

Efficiency in this sense has nothing to do with the engineer's ratio of output to input. It measures the organisation's ability to keep its members contributing, and it makes the survival of every organisation a problem of motivation.

The Barnard-Simon Theory

Simon adopted the idea in Administrative Behaviour (1947), and James March and Herbert Simon, in Organizations (1958), restated it as inducements-contributions theory. Each participant receives inducements and makes contributions, continues to participate only while the inducements are as great as or greater than the contributions, measured by his own values and by the alternatives open to him, and the contributions of one group are the source of the inducements paid to others. March and Simon described this Barnard-Simon theory of organisational equilibrium as essentially a theory of motivation, a statement of the conditions under which an organisation can induce its members to continue participating and so assure its survival.

Is It Still a Logical Model?

• For it: it explains turnover, absenteeism and the withdrawal of effort without assuming that people work for money alone, it shares the human relations finding that non-material rewards matter, and it anticipates later exchange theories such as Adams's equity theory and Vroom's expectancy model.
• Against it: it assumes members can calculate and compare inducements and contributions, which is hard where both are intangible. It treats exit as the response to imbalance, while members with few alternatives stay and withdraw effort instead. And it neglects power, since the organisation, not the member, usually sets the terms.

The second objection has an Indian application. A permanent civil service with assured tenure and few comparable outside options rarely loses members, so its equilibrium is kept or lost in effort rather than in membership. Barnard's model then describes the official who stays but contributes the minimum, and it points to the inducements that remain available when pay is fixed by commission: recognition, meaningful work, fair promotion and a shared sense of purpose.

Barnard: The Functions of the Executive

Barnard brought the social into the study of organisation. Where the classical writers saw a structure of positions to be filled and controlled, he saw a cooperative system of human activity that survives only while people choose to keep contributing to it, and that contains an informal organisation the chart does not show. The executive's job follows from that view. Executive work, in his account, is not the work of the organisation but the specialised work of maintaining the organisation in operation. The executive does not merely manage a group of persons. He maintains the system of cooperation itself, which is why his role is larger than a manager's.

Barnard named three executive functions, corresponding to the three elements of organisation.

• Providing a system of communication. This means defining the scheme of organisation, securing personnel of loyalty and capacity to fill its positions, and maintaining the informal organisation, which carries what the formal channels cannot.
• Securing essential services from individuals. This has two parts: bringing people into cooperative relationship with the organisation through recruitment, and eliciting their services once inside through incentives, persuasion, the maintenance of morale, supervision and training. It is the executive's management of the contribution-satisfaction equilibrium.
• Formulating and defining purpose. Purpose is defined less by words at the top than by the aggregate of decisions taken throughout the organisation, so responsibility for it is spread down the hierarchy. The executive must also make members believe in it. In Barnard's words, "the inculcation of belief in the real existence of a common purpose is an essential executive function". Without that belief the cooperative system dissolves into a set of individual bargains.

Coordination as the Whole

Barnard rejected the classical habit of listing coordination as one principle beside specialisation, authority and the rest. For him communication, authority, specialisation and purpose are all aspects comprehended in coordination. Coordination is therefore not a separate activity but the character of the whole cooperative system, and the three executive functions are three views of the same task.

Executive Responsibility and Morality

His chapter on the nature of executive responsibility explains what the executive adds. Executive positions, he wrote, imply a complex morality, because the executive is subject to several codes at once, his personal code, professional codes and the codes of the organisation and its units, and these may conflict. They require a high capacity of responsibility, which Barnard defined as the power of a private code of morals to control conduct in the presence of strong contrary desires or impulses. They demand technical competence as a moral factor, since good intentions without ability produce failure. Above all they require the faculty of creating morals for others: inspiring cooperative personal decisions and a faith in the common purpose that outlasts any single bargain.

This creative function is, for Barnard, the essence of leadership and the highest exercise of responsibility. His conclusion is that organisations endure in proportion to the breadth of the morality by which they are governed, so that foresight, long purposes and high ideals are the basis of the persistence of cooperation.

The assessment cuts two ways. Barnard explains why a district officer who only applies rules cannot hold a team together through a flood, an epidemic or an election, where shared purpose and morale do the work that orders cannot. But Charles Perrow and others criticised him for treating cooperation as the natural state of organisation, for neglecting conflict and power, and for giving the executive a moral authority that can shade into manipulation of the people whose beliefs he is meant to shape.

Herbert Simon

Herbert A. Simon's Administrative Behaviour (1947) is the single most consequential book in the discipline's theory. Its claim is that administration is decision making, and that a theory of administration is therefore a theory of choice under limits.

The Attack on the Principles

Simon's opening move was destructive. The principles of administration inherited from Gulick, Urwick and Fayol are not principles but proverbs: like proverbs they come in contradictory pairs, and they offer no criterion for deciding which applies. Specialisation increases efficiency, but so does unity of command, and functional specialisation of the kind Taylor wanted destroys unity of command. A narrow span of control improves supervision, and it also multiplies the levels of hierarchy through which information must pass, which the same literature says to minimise. Simon also showed that the four bases of organisation, purpose, process, clientele and place, are not independent categories at all but compete with one another, since a purpose gained through an activity is simply that activity described differently.

Fact and Value

Every decision, Simon argued, combines factual premises and value premises. Facts point to tangible and concrete information verifiable by anyone; values involve preferences and cannot be verified as true or false. Administrative propositions are therefore mixed, and the scientific study of administration must separate the two strands, confining itself to the factual.

A Pure Science of Administration

Simon wanted a pure science of administration, and that required separating values from facts so that a body of knowledge resting on the factual content of administrative behaviour could be built. In his own words, such a science "would attempt to answer such questions as: what factors determine the degree of efficiency achieved by an organisation? Under what circumstances is public responsibility secured in a government agency?" The answers to these do not depend on the value system of the inquirer. An applied science of administration would then use the empirical propositions of the pure science for implementation, according to whatever system of values applied.

The proposal has been criticised for making administration remote from social interest and less socially relevant, and this is the fault line the New Public Administration would open in 1968.

Economic Man and Administrative Man

Simon rejected the completely rational economic man of classical economics and replaced him with the realistic administrative man.

	Economic man	Administrative man
Rationality	Complete, as to both means and ends	Intendedly rational but boundedly so
Preferences	A complete and consistent system allowing choice among all alternatives	Shaped by role, duty, moral and ethical responsibility, and organisational culture
Alternatives	Complete awareness of all possible alternatives	Knows only a few, discovered sequentially
Choice rule	Selects the best alternative available	Selects one that is good enough
Status	A hypothetical position that assists analysis	A description of real decision-making behaviour

The administrative man's behaviour is conditioned by the obligations and duties of his position, his moral and ethical responsibilities, and, in a bureaucracy, by the rules and prescribed courses of action of the organisational culture. It is not practical for him to maximise. This is why Simon describes human behaviour in organisations as intendedly rational: the intention to be rational is real, and the achievement is partial.

Bounded Rationality

Rationality is bounded because the bounds arise from the limits on available information and on the decision-maker's own computational capacity. Simon identified four features that obstruct rational decision making: a multitude of problems, goals and policy commitments; barriers to gathering sufficient information; the personal needs, commitments, inhibitions and inadequacies of the decision-makers themselves; and structural difficulties.

Satisficing

Satisficing, a word Simon coined from satisfaction and sufficing, means choosing a course of action that is satisfactory or good enough. In his formulation, "the key to the simplification of the choice process is the replacement of the goal of maximising with the goal of satisficing, of finding a course of action that is good enough".

The economic man maximises, selecting the best course from those available; the administrative man satisfices, taking the first course that clears an acceptable threshold without surveying all the alternatives. The satisficing man ignores most of the complex interrelationships of the real world and applies simple rules of thumb. Simon rejected traditional game theory and statistical decision theory on precisely this ground, that they are not reality-based.

Programmed and Non-programmed Decisions

Simon divided decisions by whether a settled procedure exists for them. Programmed decisions are repetitive and routine, and the organisation has a definite procedure for handling them: standard operating procedures, rules, clerical routines and, increasingly, software. Non-programmed decisions are novel, unstructured and consequential, with no cut-and-dried method available, and they must be handled by general problem-solving capacity, judgement and heuristics.

The distinction is administratively useful rather than merely descriptive. An organisation improves by programming as much as it safely can, pushing the routine downward and outward so that scarce senior attention is reserved for what cannot be programmed. This is Taylor's exception principle restated in the language of decisions.

How Organisations Make People More Rational

Simon's constructive claim is that since the individual cannot be made fully rational, the organisation must be designed so that the individual approaches rationality as closely as possible. It does this by supplying the premises of his decisions.

• Authority supplies premises directly: the subordinate accepts a decision made elsewhere, within his zone of acceptance, without re-deciding it.
• Communication carries the information on which factual premises rest, both through formal channels and informal ones.
• Training is the most interesting of the mechanisms. It internalises the premises so that the employee acts "as desired by his own motivation rather than by the stimulus of moment-by-moment instructions". Training through conferences or formal instruction develops a common organisational language and shared frames of reference, removing some of the communication obstacles. Where formal authority is hard to exercise by command, training substitutes for it, and by building competence at lower levels it makes decentralisation of decision making possible.
• Hierarchy divides the decision so that each level handles the part it is placed to see.
• Planning and review set premises in advance and check the results against them.
• Efficiency operates as the criterion by which alternatives within the zone of acceptable values are compared.

Criticism of Simon

• Decision making is an important variable in the organisational situation but is not by itself enough to explain the totality of the organisational picture. In concentrating on the process and role of decision making, Simon relegates social, political, economic and cultural factors to the background, though their role in analysing administrative behaviour is equally important.
• His fact-based administrative theory is more relevant to business than to public administration. Excluding value premises, which are integral and essential to policy determination, diverts the study of public administration to its mechanical and routine aspects.
• The theory of decision making is too general. It provides a framework to organisational planners without supplying the detail to guide them.
• Chris Argyris argued that by insisting on rationality Simon ignored the role of intuition, tradition and faith in decision making, and that his model describes a person stripped of the emotional life that actually shapes choice.
• The administrative man is, on some readings, a counsel of conservatism: an actor who takes the first acceptable option and whose premises are supplied by the organisation is unlikely to be the source of change.

The Simon and Waldo Debate

The most important exchange in the discipline's theory ran through the American Political Science Review in 1952, arising from Dwight Waldo's article on the development of a theory of democratic administration. Simon accused Waldo of logical unrigour; Waldo charged Simon with philosophical myopia for his reliance on logical positivism.

The substance divides on three points. On fact and value, Simon, grounded in logical positivism, insisted that factual propositions could be handled scientifically while value propositions belonged to the political realm; Waldo replied that values are always involved and that public administrators cannot escape making value judgements. On method, Simon wanted a rigorous science; Waldo held that the demand for rigour was itself a value choice that narrowed what the field could study. On democracy, Waldo's point was that a discipline organised around efficiency cannot explain, let alone justify, the democratic processes that public administration exists to serve.

Neither side won, and the argument is still the spine of the subject. New Public Administration in 1968 is Waldo's position institutionalised; New Public Management in the 1980s is Simon's efficiency criterion returning in market dress.

Simon's Two-Dimensional Taxonomy of Decision Techniques

In The New Science of Management Decision (1960) Simon carried the distinction between programmed and non-programmed decisions into a classification of the techniques used to make them. The two are not separate kinds but the ends of a continuum, running from highly programmed decisions, repetitive and routine with a settled procedure, to highly non-programmed ones, novel, ill-structured and consequential. Simon crossed this dimension with a second, the age of the technique: the traditional methods organisations have always used, and the modern methods made possible by operations research and the computer. The result is a two-by-two table.

Type of decision	Traditional techniques	Modern techniques
Programmed: routine, repetitive, with a standard procedure	Habit. Clerical routine and standard operating procedures. Organisation structure: common expectations, a system of sub-goals and well-defined channels of information	Operations research: mathematical analysis, models and computer simulation. Electronic data processing
Non-programmed: one-shot, ill-structured, novel policy decisions	Judgement, intuition and creativity. Rules of thumb. Selection and training of executives	Heuristic problem-solving techniques, applied to training human decision-makers and to constructing heuristic computer programs

Three points follow. First, the degree of programming is a matter of degree, and decisions move along the continuum as an organisation learns: what was once a matter of judgement becomes a procedure once its pattern is understood. Second, Simon expected modern techniques to advance from the programmed quadrant into the non-programmed one, as heuristic programming allowed computers to simulate human problem solving. Third, the table gives the manager a rule for allocating attention: programme whatever can safely be programmed and push it downward, so that the judgement of senior officials is reserved for decisions no procedure can handle.

The same book described decision making in three phases: intelligence activity, searching the environment for conditions that call for decision, design activity, inventing and analysing possible courses of action, and choice activity, selecting one of them. In Indian administration the taxonomy is visible in the movement of routine entitlement decisions, such as pension sanction, scholarship payment and the mutation of land records, onto rule-based software, while disaster response and policy design remain non-programmed decisions that depend on judgement and on how officers are selected and trained.

Communication in Organisations

Communication is the process by which the premises of decisions are transmitted from one member of an organisation to another. Without it, authority cannot be exercised, coordination cannot occur and no decision can be executed by anyone other than the person who made it.

The Process

Three elements are essential: the sender, the receiver and the message. Communication is impossible if any is missing. A fuller model was developed by Harold Lasswell and by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1948 and 1949, covering the sender, the verbal or non-verbal content, the transmission channel selected, the receiver, and the effect of the message judged by its interpretation and the response it evokes.

• The sender initiates the process, conceptualising the message before encoding it.
• Encoding translates the message into a series of symbols, since information can be transmitted only through symbols and other forms of representation.
• The channel carries the encoded message, and the choice of channel is itself part of the message.
• Decoding is the receiver's translation back, and the encoding and decoding frames must overlap for meaning to survive the journey.
• Feedback returns the receiver's response and is the only way the sender learns whether communication occurred rather than merely transmission.
• Noise is anything that distorts the message in transit.

Communication is not confined to words. The way in which physical space is used, the arrangement of an office and of the chairs in it, communicates a great deal about a manager.

Types

• Formal communication follows the official channels laid down by the structure. Downward flow carries orders, policy and instruction; upward flow carries reports, suggestions and grievances; horizontal flow coordinates units at the same level; and diagonal flow crosses both level and line, which is Fayol's gangplank in the language of communication.
• Informal communication, the grapevine, follows social relationships rather than the chart. It is fast, it carries the feeling of the organisation as well as its facts, and it cannot be abolished. The administrative task is to keep it supplied with accurate information rather than to suppress it, since a grapevine starved of fact will carry rumour instead.

Barnard on Communication

For Barnard, a cooperative system is held together by the ability of its members to communicate with one another, and the first function of the executive is to create and maintain a system of communication. That function has three parts: defining the scheme of organisation through charts, specification of duties and division of labour; maintaining the personnel system through selection and incentives; and securing an informal organisation, which he regarded as necessary rather than merely tolerable.

A fair criticism is that Barnard treats communication as a problem of connection rather than of information. Because he places so much weight on cooperation, he gives little attention to the problem of extracting information: if everyone is working for the same common purpose there is no incentive to conceal anything, so the executive may collect all the information and decide accordingly. Real organisations do not work this way, and Weber's point about the official's informational advantage over the political superior is the direct rebuttal.

Barriers

• Structural: too many levels, so that a message is filtered at each transmission; excessive specialisation producing separate vocabularies; and physical or geographical distance.
• Semantic: the same words carrying different meanings for sender and receiver, worsened by technical jargon and, in Indian administration, by the movement between English and regional languages.
• Psychological: selective perception, distrust of the source, premature evaluation, and the reluctance of subordinates to transmit unwelcome news upward.
• Status: hierarchy suppresses upward candour, so the most senior official is often the worst-informed person about conditions at the base.
• Overload: volume beyond the receiver's capacity to process, which in practice means important messages are lost among routine ones.

Improving Communication

Shorten the chain of transmission; provide multiple and redundant channels; build systematic feedback so that reception is verified rather than assumed; use training to establish the common organisational language Simon described; protect upward channels through grievance machinery and open-door practice; and accept the informal network as part of the system rather than as interference in it.

Morale

Morale is the collective attitude of a group towards its work, its colleagues and its organisation. It is distinct from motivation, which is individual and directed at a particular effort, and the distinction matters because the two can move in opposite directions: an individual may be strongly motivated by a personal incentive in an organisation whose morale is low, and a high-morale unit may still contain individuals doing very little.

Morale is usually treated as a function of confidence in the organisation's purpose and leadership, a sense of belonging to the group, perceived fairness in reward and discipline, security of tenure, and the belief that one's work matters. Its indices are indirect: absenteeism, turnover, grievance rates, indiscipline and the ordinary quality of work.

Barnard's account connects it to the executive function. Every organisation must attend to the maintenance and growth of its authority in order to survive, and does so, in his list, by maintaining morale, education and training, incentives, and supervision and control.

Motivation

Abraham Maslow: Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow arranged human needs in a hierarchy in which the lower must be satisfied before the higher become active.

• Physiological: the requirements of biological existence, which in employment terms is the basic wage.
• Safety and security: once physiological needs are substantially satisfied they cease to motivate, and the individual begins to care not merely for the present but for the future. Tenure, pension and predictable conditions answer this level.
• Social: the need for identity and belonging. The organisation must provide opportunities for good social relationships among its employees.
• Esteem: once people begin to satisfy the need to belong, they want to be held in esteem by themselves and by others, which yields the satisfactions of power, prestige, status and self-confidence. Where these needs are frustrated, employees may behave irresponsibly in order to satisfy them.
• Self-actualisation: the desire to become what one is capable of becoming, to maximise one's potential and accomplish something. At this level employees are motivated by a sense of duty.

The first three are the lower needs and the last two the higher. The lesson Maslow offers a manager is to find out which level a subordinate is operating at, since an incentive pitched at a satisfied need does not motivate. The standing criticisms are that the hierarchy is not universal across cultures, that people pursue several levels at once, and that the empirical support is thin.

Frederick Herzberg: Motivation and Hygiene

Herzberg's finding is that satisfaction and dissatisfaction at work are produced by two different sets of factors rather than by more and less of one.

• Hygiene factors, which are extrinsic and relate to the context of work: pay, supervision, working conditions, company policy, job security and interpersonal relations. Their absence produces dissatisfaction; their presence does not produce satisfaction, only its absence.
• Motivators, which are intrinsic and relate to the content of work: achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement and growth. These produce satisfaction, and their effect lasts longer than the effect of hygiene factors.

The crucial formulation is that job satisfaction is not the opposite of job dissatisfaction. The opposite of job satisfaction is no job satisfaction, and the opposite of job dissatisfaction is no job dissatisfaction. Hygiene factors must be present or dissatisfaction arises; but attending to them alone produces a workforce that is not unhappy and not motivated either.

Herzberg's prescription is job enrichment, the deliberate upgrading of the responsibility and challenge of work, since small repetitive jobs lower motivation. He distinguished vertical job loading, weaving opportunities for achievement and learning into the job, from horizontal job loading, adding or shifting from one undemanding task to another, which accomplishes nothing. Vertical loading is done by removing some controls while retaining or increasing responsibility, granting freedom and authority, making employees accountable for their own work, making reports available to the employees concerned, and introducing genuinely difficult tasks.

Douglas McGregor: Theory X and Theory Y

McGregor's argument is that every managerial practice rests on an implicit theory of human nature, and that the theory usually held is wrong.

Theory X assumes that the average person dislikes work and avoids it, must therefore be coerced, controlled, directed and threatened with punishment, prefers to be directed, wishes to avoid responsibility, has relatively little ambition and wants security above all.

Theory Y assumes the opposite set:

• The expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest.
• Self-direction and self-control operate in the service of objectives to which a person is committed.
• Commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards associated with their achievement.
• The average human being learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept responsibility but to seek it.
• The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of creativity, imagination and ingenuity in solving organisational problems is widely distributed.
• In modern industrial life the intellectual potentialities of the average human being are only partly utilised.

The sharp consequence is that Theory X is self-confirming. If employees are lazy, indifferent, unwilling to take responsibility, uncreative and uncooperative, the cause lies in management's method of organisation and control. The central principle of Theory Y is integration: creating conditions in which members of an organisation achieve their own goals best by directing their efforts towards the success of the organisation. External control and the threat of punishment are not the only means of obtaining effort.

David McClelland: Achievement Motivation

McClelland held that needs are learned rather than innate, and identified the needs for achievement, affiliation and power. His interest was in achievement motivation, and his ring-toss experiment is the memorable illustration: volunteers threw rings over pegs with no distance stipulated, and most threw from arbitrary, random distances, while a small group measured and tested distances first. McClelland read this as the need for a balanced challenge.

Achievement-motivated people are a contrast to gamblers and are not risk-takers; they set goals they can influence through their own ability and effort. Achievement matters more to them than material or financial reward and gives greater personal satisfaction than recognition; financial reward is a measure of success rather than an end; security and status are not prime motivators; feedback is necessary because it permits the measurement of success; and they continually seek better ways of doing things. The administrative application is in selection and placement: a person with a high need for achievement should be placed where the job characteristics allow that need to be exercised.

Stacy Adams: Equity Theory

Adams, writing in 1963, made the point the other theories omit: what motivates is not the absolute reward but whether the individual perceives the reward structure as fair. The employee compares the ratio of his own inputs and outcomes with the same ratio for a reference person, and inequity in either direction produces tension and a move to restore balance, by reducing effort, seeking more reward, changing the comparison or leaving. The theory explains why a pay revision that raises everyone's salary can still lower morale, which no need-based theory can account for.

Victor Vroom: Expectancy Theory

Vroom's model holds that motivation is a product of three judgements rather than of a need: expectancy, that effort will produce performance; instrumentality, that performance will produce the reward; and valence, that the reward is worth having. Because the three combine multiplicatively, motivation collapses if any one is near zero. The administrative reading is uncomfortable for public systems: where promotion is by seniority, instrumentality is low whatever the effort, and the theory predicts precisely the behaviour usually attributed to individual character.

Chris Argyris: Immaturity to Maturity

Argyris argued that human personality develops along a continuum from immaturity towards maturity, from passivity to activity, dependence to relative independence, shallow to deeper interests, a short to a longer time perspective, and subordinate to equal or superordinate position. Formal organisation, with its specialisation, chain of command, unity of direction and narrow span of control, demands the immature end of that continuum from adults who have reached the mature end. The resulting frustration produces absenteeism, apathy, aggression and informal restriction of output, which management then reads as proof that tighter control is needed, closing the loop.

Rensis Likert: Systems 1 to 4 and the Linking Pin

Likert placed management styles along a continuum and marked four points on it: System 1, exploitative authoritative; System 2, benevolent authoritative; System 3, consultative; and System 4, participative. The systems are arrayed along two dimensions, the type of authority or control the organisation exercises over its members, and its operating characteristics. His empirical claim was that System 4 organisations perform better over time, and his prescription was to move organisations towards it.

His linking pin model rebuilds the organisation as a set of overlapping work groups rather than a chain of individuals. Each manager holds twin roles in two overlapping groups, as a member of the higher-level group and the leader of the lower-level one, and communication passes through people occupying both. Group functions matter more than individual roles, though Likert warned against superfluous multiplication of functions and committees: overlapping groups should exist only where they are needed to perform the linking function. The growth is upward from the organisational base, in contrast to top-down management in traditional hierarchies.

The model is criticised for simply drawing triangles around the existing hierarchical structure without changing it, and for slowing down decision making.

On conflict Likert is worth citing directly. He defines it as "the active striving for one's own preferred outcome, which if attained, precludes the attainment by others of their own preferred outcome, thereby producing hostility", and distinguishes substantive conflict, arising from the substance of the task, from affective conflict, arising from the emotional aspects of interpersonal relations. His remedy for both is System 4 management.

Clayton Alderfer: ERG Theory

Clayton Alderfer, in an article of 1969 and in Existence, Relatedness, and Growth (1972), reworked Maslow's hierarchy to fit evidence from organisations. He compressed Maslow's five levels into three.

• Existence needs: material and physiological desires, corresponding to Maslow's physiological and safety needs, and met by pay, benefits and working conditions.
• Relatedness needs: relationships with family, colleagues, superiors and friends, corresponding to Maslow's social needs and the external part of esteem.
• Growth needs: the desire for creative and productive personal development, corresponding to the internal part of esteem and to self-actualisation.

The changes in assumption matter more than the change in number.

• More than one need can operate at once. A person may seek growth while existence needs are still unmet, so the hierarchy is not a strict ladder.
• The order is not fixed. Culture and personal history can change the priority of needs, which answers the objection that Maslow's order is Western and middle-class.
• Frustration-regression. Maslow allowed only satisfaction-progression, upward movement as each level is met. Alderfer added that when a higher need is frustrated, a person falls back on a lower one and intensifies demand for it. An employee denied growth in a dead-end post presses harder for pay.
• A continuum rather than steps. The three categories shade into one another, which made the theory easier to test.

ERG therefore reconceptualises the hierarchy rather than rejecting it. It keeps the idea that needs differ in kind, drops the claim that they must be satisfied in sequence, and adds a mechanism that explains behaviour Maslow cannot. Its administrative lesson is that where promotion and responsibility are blocked, as in a seniority-bound service, demands for pay and allowances will intensify, and money alone will not settle them. Its weakness is that its empirical support, though better than Maslow's, is still limited and its categories remain broad.

McGregor's The Professional Manager

The Professional Manager (1967), published after McGregor's death in 1964 and edited by Caroline McGregor and Warren Bennis, revises the argument of The Human Side of Enterprise (1960) in three ways.

• Managerial cosmology. Every manager acts on a cosmology, a largely unexamined set of beliefs about people, causation and the world in which he works. It shapes what he perceives, how he interprets the behaviour of subordinates and which strategies seem sensible to him, so his role perceptions follow from it. McGregor now said that Theory X and Theory Y were not managerial strategies but underlying beliefs about the nature of man that lead managers to adopt one strategy rather than another. Changing practice therefore requires making the cosmology explicit and testing it against evidence.
• The manager as a professional. As the engineer applies physical science, the professional manager applies the knowledge of the behavioural sciences. The model is the relationship of a professional to a client, in which the professional helps not by dictating to the client but by placing knowledge and skill at the client's disposal.
• The rational and emotive individual. Human behaviour is not purely rational, and feelings are facts the manager must take into account. The manager is himself a rational and emotive individual whose task is to work through the differences among people and build a managerial team, since the work of a modern organisation is done by interdependent groups rather than by individuals.

The difference from Theory Y is one of object and of tone. Theory Y was a set of assumptions about subordinates and their capacity for self-direction, with the integration of individual and organisational goals as its principle. The Professional Manager turns to the manager himself, to his beliefs, his emotions and his relations with peers, and treats conflict and difference as the normal material of teamwork rather than as failures of integration.

It also clarifies why Theory Y is indicative rather than prescriptive. McGregor never offered it as a formula or as a licence for soft management. Its assumptions indicate possibilities: the limits on human collaboration in organisations lie not in human nature but in management's ingenuity in discovering how to realise the potential of its people. How to realise it is left to the manager's judgement in each situation, just as a professional places knowledge at the client's disposal instead of dictating to him.

Public Service Motivation

Public service motivation (PSM) is the claim that people in government are moved by motives that theories drawn from business omit. James Perry and Lois Wise, in "The Motivational Bases of Public Service" (Public Administration Review, 1990), defined it as an individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions and organisations. They grouped the motives into three kinds.

• Rational: motives of individual utility, such as the attraction of taking part in policy formulation, commitment to a public programme through personal identification with it, and advocacy of a special interest.
• Norm-based: a desire to serve the public interest, loyalty to duty and to the government as a whole, and commitment to social equity.
• Affective: commitment to a programme from genuine conviction about its social importance, and the patriotism of benevolence, a love of the people and of the political community.

Their propositions explain why PSM is treated as an inducement to efficiency: the greater a person's PSM, the more likely he is to seek membership of a public organisation, PSM is positively related to individual performance in public organisations, and organisations that attract members with high PSM are less dependent on utilitarian incentives to manage performance. Perry (1996) later measured it along four dimensions: attraction to public policy making, commitment to the public interest, compassion and self-sacrifice.

Used as an inducement, PSM points administration in four directions.

• Recruitment can test for public service values, so that the system selects for motivation as well as ability.
• Job design can connect officials to the visible results of their work, raising the sense that it matters.
• Recognition should accompany pay, since pay-for-performance schemes can crowd out intrinsic motivation in work whose value lies in its purpose.
• Leadership that communicates the mission of the organisation links personal values to daily work.

Indian practice draws on the idea. Mission Karmayogi (2020) frames capacity building around the role and values of the public servant rather than rules alone, and the Prime Minister's Awards for Excellence in Public Administration recognise innovation by districts and officers. The approach has limits. PSM is measured largely through self-reports, which invite socially desirable answers. Entry to the civil services is also prized for security, status and power, so a high level of PSM cannot be assumed. And motivation without resources and autonomy turns into frustration and burnout, so PSM supplements sound structure, fair pay and accountable management rather than replacing them.

Leadership

Keith Davis defines leadership as "the ability to persuade others to seek defined objectives, enthusiastically. It is the human factor which binds a group together and motivates it towards goals." Koontz and Weihrich describe it as "the art or process of influencing people so that they will strive willingly and enthusiastically towards the achievement of group goals", adding that leaders do not stand behind a group to push and prod but place themselves before it to facilitate progress.

Why Leadership Is Needed

Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn locate the essence of leadership in the "influential increment which goes beyond routine and taps bases of power beyond those that are organisationally decreed". Their reasons for its necessity are the best available answer to why a well-designed structure still needs leaders.

• The incompleteness of formal organisational design. A formal organisation is generally incomplete and imperfect, and its voids are filled by the informal organisation, so that the real organisation differs widely from the formal one. Leadership compensates for the weakness inherent in formal design.
• Changing environmental conditions. Technological, legal and cultural change require corresponding changes in the organisation, which a leader must bring about.
• The internal dynamics of the organisation. As it grows, new structural complexities appear, new needs for coordination arise and new policies must be invented.
• The nature of human membership. People belong to several organisations at once and bring divided loyalties and changing expectations with them.

The Great Man Theory

One of the earliest theories, holding that leaders in general and great leaders in particular are born and not made. Born leaders inherit favourable traits that separate them from those who cannot lead. Figures such as Napoleon, Nelson, Mao Tse-tung and Mahatma Gandhi are cited as natural leaders who received no training in leadership and acquired no specific leadership skills, such skills being natural to them, with an innate urge to assume leadership and an inborn will to achieve.

The theory has no scientific basis and is devoid of empirical validity. It is speculative, and it is misleading to contend that good administrators are born rather than trained, since the claim would make the entire apparatus of administrative training pointless.

Trait Theory

The trait approach retains the assumption that leadership inheres in the person but tries to make it empirical by listing the qualities that distinguish leaders: intelligence, initiative, self-assurance, decisiveness, integrity, energy. The research defeated itself. The lists produced by different studies did not agree, the traits identified were possessed by many people who never led anything, and no trait predicted effectiveness across different situations. The failure is what pushed the field towards behaviour and then towards situation.

Behavioural Theories and the Managerial Grid

The behavioural school asked what leaders do rather than what they are, and converged on two independent dimensions: concern for the task and concern for people. The Ohio State studies called these initiating structure and consideration, and the Michigan studies distinguished production-centred from employee-centred supervision.

Robert Blake and Jane Mouton turned the two dimensions into the managerial grid, scoring concern for production and concern for people from one to nine and naming the corners: impoverished management at 1,1 with minimal effort on either; country club at 1,9 with attention to people at the cost of output; task or authority-compliance at 9,1; middle of the road at 5,5; and team management at 9,9, which they held to be the one best style. The claim that 9,9 is always best is exactly what the contingency theorists denied.

Situational and Contingency Theories

• Fred Fiedler made effectiveness depend on the match between the leader's style, measured by his rating of the least preferred co-worker, and the favourableness of the situation, itself composed of leader-member relations, task structure and position power. Task-oriented leaders perform best in very favourable and very unfavourable situations, relationship-oriented leaders in the middle range. Fiedler's position that style is relatively fixed implies that the situation should be engineered to fit the leader rather than the reverse.
• Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard made the appropriate style depend on the maturity or readiness of the followers, moving through telling, selling, participating and delegating as competence and willingness rise. It is the most directly usable of the leadership models for a supervisor with a mixed team.
• Robert House's path-goal theory casts the leader's function as clarifying the path to the reward and removing the obstacles along it, which connects leadership to Vroom's expectancy model.

Transactional and Transformational Leadership

Transactional leadership works by exchange: the leader clarifies what is required, and rewards or corrects performance against it. It is the ordinary mode of bureaucratic supervision and it maintains an organisation efficiently without changing it.

Transformational leadership, associated with James MacGregor Burns and developed by Bernard Bass, works by raising the aspirations of followers so that they transcend their own immediate interests for a collective purpose. Its components are usually given as idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration. Burns's own distinction is that the transforming leader engages with followers in a way that raises both leader and led to higher levels of motivation and morality, which is why the model is the one usually invoked for administrative reform.

Leadership in Public Administration

The leadership literature is drawn from business and transfers to government imperfectly, which is a point worth making in an answer rather than assuming. The public administrator leads without control over the two instruments the models assume: he cannot usually set the goal, which is fixed by statute or by the political executive, and he cannot usually distribute the reward, since pay and promotion are governed by service rules. What he has instead is the authority of office, the example of his own conduct, and the ability to protect his subordinates from arbitrary interference.

Tenure compounds the difficulty. A district officer transferred every eighteen months cannot pursue a transformational agenda that requires years, and the frequent transfer of Indian civil servants is therefore not only an administrative irritant but a structural limit on what leadership in the public service can be. The theories remain useful, but the honest conclusion is that public leadership is exercised against constraints the business literature does not contemplate.

William Reddin: The 3-D Model

The Ohio State studies identified two independent dimensions of leader behaviour, initiating structure and consideration, and Blake and Mouton's grid scored concern for production and concern for people and held the 9,9 team style to be best everywhere. William J. Reddin, in Managerial Effectiveness (1970), kept the two dimensions as task orientation and relationships orientation and added a third, effectiveness, the extent to which a manager achieves the output requirements of his position. His central claim is that no style is effective or ineffective in itself: any style has situations appropriate to it and many situations inappropriate to it.

The first two dimensions yield four basic styles, and the third splits each into a more effective and a less effective version, according to whether it fits the situation.

Basic style	Orientation	Less effective	More effective
Separated	Low task, low relationships	Deserter	Bureaucrat
Related	Low task, high relationships	Missionary	Developer
Dedicated	High task, low relationships	Autocrat	Benevolent autocrat
Integrated	High task, high relationships	Compromiser	Executive

The model added two things to its predecessors. It made effectiveness a separate dimension instead of an assumed product of one style, so that the integrated 9,9 manager becomes a mere compromiser where the situation calls for decisiveness, while a separated style becomes an effective bureaucrat in an office whose work is routine and where procedure is the point. It also asks of the manager two skills, situational sensitivity, reading what the situation demands, and style flexibility, changing style to meet it. For public administration the bureaucrat style fairly describes what much routine regulatory work requires, while disaster management demands a dedicated or integrated style. The criticism is that the situational variables are loosely defined and that effectiveness is judged after the event, so the model is easier to apply in hindsight than in advance.

Leaders and Managers: Bennis and Kotter

The distinction between leading and managing was opened by Abraham Zaleznik in "Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?" (Harvard Business Review, 1977) and given its best-known form by Warren Bennis. In Leaders (1985), written with Burt Nanus, he put it as the proposition that managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing. The manager's concern is efficiency in performing a given task, while the leader's concern is whether it is the right task. In On Becoming a Leader (1989) he extended the contrast.

The manager	The leader
Administers	Innovates
Maintains	Develops
Focuses on systems and structure	Focuses on people
Relies on control	Inspires trust
Has a short-range view	Has a long-range perspective
Asks how and when	Asks what and why
Accepts the status quo	Challenges it

John Kotter, in "What Leaders Really Do" (Harvard Business Review, 1990) and A Force for Change (1990), gave the distinction a functional basis. Management is about coping with complexity: it brings order and consistency to large organisations through planning and budgeting, organising and staffing, and controlling and problem solving. Leadership is about coping with change: setting a direction, aligning people behind it, and motivating and inspiring them. Kotter concluded that most organisations are over-managed and under-led, and that both are needed in proportions that depend on how complex the organisation is and how fast its environment changes.

Is the Distinction Valid?

• Valid as a distinction of function. Setting direction and maintaining order are different activities, and an organisation can have one without the other. A department run with procedural correctness towards an obsolete objective is well managed and badly led.
• Overdrawn as a distinction of persons. Henry Mintzberg, in The Nature of Managerial Work (1973), counted leader among the ten roles of every manager, and doing the right things achieves nothing unless they are also done rightly. Most administrators must do both in the same week.
• Biased. The contrast tends to romanticise the leader and belittle the manager, though many organisational failures are failures of execution rather than of vision.
• Contextual. Stable, rule-bound work needs management above all, while reform, crisis and turbulence call for leadership. The success of an organisation depends on matching the mix to its situation, which connects the argument to the contingency theories of leadership.

Indian administration supplies both sides. T.N. Seshan's tenure as Chief Election Commissioner (1990 to 1996) changed what the Model Code of Conduct meant in practice, a case of leadership redirecting an institution, while the routine conduct of elections by district officers is management of great complexity. E. Sreedharan's direction of the Delhi Metro combined the two: a clear commitment to time-bound completion, and tight managerial control of contracts and schedules.