Abraham_Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow Abraham Harold Maslow was born April 1st, 1908 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was the eldest of seven children born to Jewish parents that had immigrated from Russia. Maslow attended City College in New York, transferred to Cornell University after three semesters then he transferred back to City College of New York. He married and he and his wife moved to Wisconsin where he attended the University of Wisconsin. He received his B.A. in 1930, his M.A. in 1931 and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology and all from the University of Wisconsin. A year later he returned to New York to work with E.L. Thorndike at Columbia University. From 1937 to 1951, Maslow was on the faculty at Brooklyn College where he found two more mentors. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer both of whom he admired personally and professionally, so much so that he began taking notes about them and their behavior, which became the basis of his lifelong research and thinking about mental health and human potential.1 Maslow is mostly noted today for his proposal of a hierarchy of human needs and is considered the father of humanistic psychology. He saw human needs arranged like a ladder. The most basic needs, at the bottom, were physical – air, water, food, sex. Then came safety needs – security, stability – followed by psychological, or social needs for belonging, love and acceptance. At the top of it were all of the self-actualizing needs – the need to fulfill oneself, to become all that one is capable of becoming. Maslow hypothesized that unfulfilled needs lower on the ladder would inhibit the person from climbing to the next step. People who dealt in managing higher needs were what he called self-actualizing people. Benedict and Wertheimer were his models of self-actualization, from which he generalized that, self-actualizing people tend to focus on problems outside of themselves, have a clear sense of what is true and what is phony, are spontaneous and creative and not are overly restricted by social conventions.2 In 1962 Maslow received an invitation by Andrew Kay, the president of a technology company called Non-Linear Systems, in Del Mar, California. Kay, who was taken by Maslow’s theories of self-actualization, had decided to put Maslow’s theories to the test. Kay decided to experiment with replacing his company’s voltmeter-producing assembly lines with work teams responsible for an entire product and Maslow accepted the invitation to observe. Maslow kept a journal and in it he wrote about “enlightened management,“ describing the type of workplace that could be the most conductive to the workers’ reaching a point of self-actualization. He wrote about trust among workers and management, the need for honest recognition and the importance of continuous improvement. He also pointed out that you have to have different personnel policies for different people in different situations for them to be truly affective. Maslow’s contribution is much more in it’s potential than it is in its reality. If organizations were designed to allow the vast majority of people to self-actualize, to discover and draw upon their true talents and creative passions and commit to the pursuit of those activities toward a pinnacle of excellence and the organization were to revolve around those self-actualizing people the outcome would be nothing short of a revolution of work and society.3 Maslow does not back up his theories of motivation with any real life experiments. He underlines the fact that the hierarchy of needs is never fully exposed in human behavior, as behavior is always influenced by a large number of factors. Maslow points out that although cultural differences have an impact on how people satisfy their needs, the needs are felt in the sub-conscious level and are not much affected by social or cultural circumstances.4 References 1. “Pioneers” - Abraham Maslow,” AtpWeb.org, website, http://www.atpweb.org/pioneers/pioneers.maslow.html, Accessed January 15, 2010. 2. “Management Gurus” – Abraham Maslow,” VectorStudy.om, 2008 website, http://www.vectorstudy.com/management_gurus/abraham_maslow.htm, accessed January 15th, 2010. 3. "THE ENLIGHTENED MANAGER'S GUIDEBOOK - In 1962 Renowned Psychologist Abraham H Maslow Spent the Summer at a Small Technology Company Observing His Ideas About Motivation Being Put to the Test. Since Then, Those Ideas Have Inspired an Entire Generation of Management Thinkers, Including Peter Drucker and Jim Collins. The Journals Maslow Kept, Which Are Being Rereleased This Month, Seem As Fresh As They Did More Than 30 Years Ago and Offer Lessons to Anyone Who's Trying to Grow a Business Full of Highly Motivated People." Inc. 20.14 (1998): 44. 4. “A theory of Human Motivation by Abraham Maslow,” .Docstoc.com, website, http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2215831/A Theory of Human Motivation by Abraham Maslow, accessed January 15, 2010.