Abraham Maslow:

Father of Enlightened Management

By Edward Hoffman

An Article in Training Magazine, September 1988, pages 79-82.

Perhaps more than any American psychologist of the past half-century, Abraham
Maslow has affected how we view ourselves. Although he is well-known as the
originator of the concept that bears his name, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that's
only a part of his legacy. His provocative ideas about motivation, self-actualization
and synergy have become familiar concepts to many managers, management
theorists and trainers. His humanistic approach to psychology has influenced fields
as diverse as counseling, health care, education and marketing.

Yet all too often, his approach is distorted and misinterpreted, even by his
staunchest advocates. This year, the 80th anniversary of his birth, is a good time to
highlight Maslow's influential managerial ideas and help clarify his views.

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.

At Wisconsin Maslow was trained as an experimental psychologist. All his
professors were fervent behaviorists who believed that meaningful theories of
human nature could best be developed by studying lower animals like white rats in
laboratory settings. Although Maslow subscribed to this view for a time, he decided
that monkeys made better research subjects because of their similarity to our own
species. His doctoral research examined dominance and sexual behavior in
monkeys' social order. Returning to New York City in the mid-1930s, Maslow
landed a faculty position at Brooklyn College. He taught courses and continued his
research, although he shifted his focus from monkeys to humans. His pi pioneering
studies of women's sexuality preceded Alfred Kinsey's famous sexological studies
by several years, and influenced Kinsey and others. "I thought that working on sex
was the easiest way to help mankind," Maslow later recalled. "If I could discover a
way to improve the sexual life by even 1 percent, then I could improve the whole
species."

In 1938, at the behest of his friends Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, both
anthropologists at Columbia University, Maslow conducted field work among
Canada's Blackfoot Indians. The experience convinced him that we can learn much
from studying the daily lives of people in other cultures. It also convinced him that
people around the world are far more alike than they are different, and that we all
share certain inborn needs and drives. These conclusions began to guide his
research on emotional security as a trait that has a profound impact on our social
relations. But how to organize all these observations into a coherent theory of
personality? In trying to do so, Maslow studied the writings of European
psychological thinkers such as Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Karen Horny and Max
Wertheimer.

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 articles published in 1942 and 1943, he outlined his theory. "It is quite true that
man lives by bread alone-where there is no bread," he wrote. "But what happens to
[our] desires when there [is] plenty of bread and when [our] belly is chronically
filled? At once, other and `higher' needs emerge and these, rather than
physiological hungers, dominate [us]. And when these in turn are satisfied, again
new and still `higher' needs emerge, and so on. This is what we mean by saying that
basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy.... "

Although Maslow's theory has become tremendously influential, it initially
attracted only modest attention. Maslow, undismayed, plunged into exploring the
traits of self-actualizing men and women. He believed that only by studying
emotionally healthy, achieving people can we really begin to understand our true
nature and potential.

Maslow was excited by the prospect of such exploration, but in the mid-1940s he
was stricken with intense fatigue and became too weak to teach. To support his
family, he took a position as plant manager at the Maslow Cooperage, a branch of
his brothers' family business in rural Pleasanton, CA. His brothers wanted to give
him an easy job in a peaceful setting, and their plan worked admirably. His
workday consisted of supervising coopers who repaired wooden barrels for a
nearby winery. When he recovered from his mysterious illness, Maslow's brothers
invited him to become a permanent partner of the company. He declined the offer,
but his practical lessons at the Maslow Cooperage played an important role in his
subsequent managerial theorizing.

He returned to teaching and research at Brandeis University near Boston, where he
wrote Motivation and Personality, a brilliant and far reaching work published in

1954. "The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative
than on the positive side," Maslow insisted. "It has revealed to us much about man's
shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues,
his achievable aspirations or his psychological health. It is as if psychology had
voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction.... We must find out
what psychology... might be, if it could free itself from the stultifying effects of
limited, pessimistic and stingy preoccupations with human nature."

Motivation and Personality catapulted Maslow to national prominence. The book
was widely acknowledged as a major psychological achievement of the 1950s. Its
ideas, the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization-began to penetrate other realms,
particularly the budding field of management theory. To many people interested in
psychology and its practical applications in everyday life, Maslow's name began to
stand for an innovative and optimistic approach to human nature.

Douglas McGregor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was
among those influenced by Maslow's work. McGregor's landmark book, The
Human Side of Enterprise, published in 1960, highlighted two distinct managerial
perspectives: Theory X, which views people as inherently lazy and selfish, and
Theory Y, which regards them as innately productive and cooperative. In outlining
Theory Y, McGregor clearly subscribed to Maslow's optimistic view of human
nature.

Shortly thereafter Maslow was asked to observe a real-life testing of his theories at
Non-Linear Systems (NLS), a high-tech company based in California. Its owner-
entrepreneur Andy Kay, now associated with Kaypro Computers, organized the
work environment around Theory-Y principles. Employee creativity, cooperation
and self-direction were encouraged as much as possible. There was a strong
emphasis on employee training and growth on the job. Teams of line workers
helped determine daily work schedules and activities. There was even a "vice
president for innovation."

The experiment was producing results: Absenteeism and turnover plummeted,
while productivity and profits soared. But Maslow remained skeptical. He worried
that NLS and its supporters were too readily embracing his ideas. In a diary note,
he wrote, "They're being taken as gospel truth, without any real examination of
their reliability, validity. The carryover from clinic to industry is really a huge and
shaky step, but they're going ahead enthusiastically and optimistically... as if all the
facts were in, and it was [already] proven."

During his stay at NLS, Maslow recorded his observations as well as his reactions
to managerial books he was reading. Gradually a manuscript took form, its subjects
ranging from methods of enhancing employee motivation to the psychology of
leadership. He elaborated on the concept of synergy, which anthropologist Ruth
Benedict originally had used in unpublished lectures in 1941 to refer to cultures in

which cooperation is rewarded and advantageous to all. Benedict's notion was
almost unknown except to Maslow, Margaret Mead and a few others who had
known her personally. Now Maslow saw synergy as an underlying principle of
management and human relationships in organizations. NLS was demonstrating
that the company's and the employees' interests could converge through what
Maslow called "enlightened management."

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.

In the five years between Eupsychian Management and his death in 1970, Maslow
enjoyed international renown as a founder of the rapidly growing movement to
humanize the workplace. He was elected president of the American Psychological
Association in 1966. And he began work on a new theoretical concept: the
"Theory-Z" approach to management. He intended to break new conceptual ground
beyond McGregor's Theory-X and Theory-Y dichotomy.

In essence, Maslow contended that neither X nor Y is really accurate. He theorized
that as people grow toward self-actualization, their psychological needs at work
undergo a corresponding change. Salary increases alone, for example, don't mean
much to those propelled by higher needs. The chance to be creative and
autonomous becomes increasingly important as a job motivator. Maslow called this
form of compensation "metapay." He began to collect job advertisements for
engineers, executives, Peace Corps volunteers, and others to dramatize his belief
that metapay and similar concepts were tacitly being recognized and implemented
in the American workplace.

Maslow would no doubt be pleased with the changes that have occurred in the
workplace since his death in 1970. However, he probably would reject several
aspects of "New-Age management" with which he is erroneously associated.

For one thing, 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."

Second, 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."

Edward Hoffman, Ph.D., is a New York City psychologist and author of The Right to Be
Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, recently published by Tarcher/St. Martin's Press.