Abraham Maslow

Maslow was born in New York City in 1908, the oldest child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Because his father was a successful small businessman, Abe, as everyone called him-worked only occasionally in positions such as delivery boy and hotel busboy. It gave him lots of leisure time in his teenage years, which he spent reading. Eventually, he developed strong idealistic notions and decided to dedicate himself to bettering the world through science. After floundering a bit at New York's City College and Cornell University, he chose to major in psychology and transferred to the University of Wisconsin in 1928. During the 1940s, Maslow steadily advanced a new explanation of human nature. Its foundation was his radical theory of motivation, which has come to be known as the hierarchy of needs. He contended that we all have needs for physical safety, belongingness, love, self-respect, self-esteem and what he called self-actualization-the desire to become all that we can become in life. In 1965, this manuscript was published as Eupsychian Management (eupsychia was Maslow's term for the ideal society or organization). Despite the formidable title, the book brought Maslow praise from America's leaders in management education and training. Although gratified by the response, Maslow remained realistic-perhaps more so than some of his fans. He realized that the humanistic approach depends partly on good conditions and that a sudden downturn in the international economy or domestic markets might make the principles of enlightened management less tenable. Maslow did not view enlightened management as an organizational cure-all. Nor did he see it as a substitute for poor production or quality control. Speaking of contemporary organizations, Maslow declared, "If the product they turn out is not good, then [enlightened management] will destroy the whole enterprise, as truth will generally destroy untruth and fakery.... [Enlightened] management works only for virtuous situations, where everybody trusts the product and can identify with it and be proud of it.... If the product is not good and must be concealed and faked and lied about, then only Theory-X managers, customers and sales people are possible. Maslow frequently reminded trainers and others that in our embrace of humanistic ideals, we ought not lose sight of the simple fact that people have different motivational needs. He readily acknowledged that some employees are not seeking to self-actualize in the workplace; fulfillment for them lies elsewhere. Humanistically minded managers and trainers who attempt to force their idea of self-actualized traits and values upon employees may well produce resistance and resentment-especially when they try to "align" the whole package with the current goals of some particular corporation. But Maslow was ultimately an optimist. "The old-style management is steadily becoming obsolete," he declared. "The more psychologically healthy [people get], the more will enlightened management be necessary in order to survive in competition, and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy.... That is why I am so optimistic about [enlightened] management... why I consider it to be the wave of the future."