Future Visions: : The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow

Citation

Chin, A.S. (1998), "Future Visions: : The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 74-77. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.1998.11.1.74.2

Edward Hoffman, a clinical psychologist, has selected and compiled a very readable, indeed, moving volume of Abraham Maslow’s unpublished papers and journal entries, stretching from l943 to a few days before his death from a heart attack on June 4, l970. These short “papers”, notes by Maslow to himself, provide glimpses into his candid, circuitous intellectual journey and persistent moral search as he abandoned the prevailing mechanistic and, what he felt to be, pessimistic view of human nature and moved toward a positive conception of human beings as self‐perfecting, morally responsible members of an improvable society. We owe the editor gratitude for keeping Maslow’s ground breaking idea alive, and for reminding us of our collective debt to Maslow as we in the behavioral sciences and applied fields now take for granted much of Malsow’s vision. An inspiring story such as Maslow’s is always welcome in a fresh, appealing form, especially for a new generation of readers looking for intellectual role models.

This volume is a useful supplement to Hoffman’s The Right to be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow (1988). The Unpublished Papers, besides bringing closure to the work of a productive mind, is also a more accessable size for the non‐specialist reader who may not have the appetite for the detailed chronicling of Maslow’s activities and contacts in the full biography. This sampling of Maslow’s writing is a shortcut into his journey of self discovery, bypassing his numerous books and articles.

This new volume starts with a foreword by Colin Wilson, who has also written a book on Maslow. Wilson puts these “papers” in the context of literature on the human psyche. Hoffman follows with a biographical sketch, beginning with Maslow’s childhood years as a son of struggling immigrant parents in Brooklyn. It also describes his years of schooling, tracing mentors and other influences in his life, and outlining his work experiences and the evolution of his thinking.

Hoffman organizes the text into three categories: Part I describes Maslow’s thinking on the subjects of personality, growth and therapy, Part II focuses on “re‐visioning pychology,” and Part III contains Maslow’s comments on the Esalen Institute and T‐groups, on characteristics of good administrators in organizations, and on broader social issues. At the beginning of each entry, Hoffman provides a useful introductory paragraph, orienting the reader with dates and circumstances during the time of Maslow’s writing. My comments on the volume will be confined to that portion of Part III which deals with management and the organization.

If I were to add to the excellent intellectual and political background provided by Wilson in the Preface, I might include the sociological context of American society in the l930s and 1940s, when Maslow was reaching adulthood. Social observers of the American industrial‐bureaucratic society were increasingly concerned with the fragmentation of the individual. Industrial workers were given small, repetitious tasks to perform, and factories were run along the lines of Taylor’s “scientific system of management.” More and more Americans were occupying slots in hierarchically‐structured organizations. David Riesman’s “lonely crowd” and William R. White’s “organization man” captured popular concerns over the individual’s place in society, and provided the setting for Maslow’s pioneering conception of the “whole person,” the self with higher purpose, capable of achieving lofty goals for both self and society.

Maslow’s pioneering role in management is acknowledged in Frank G. Gobel’s The Third Force: The Psychology of Abraham Maslow (l970). Gobel quotes a business survey conducted by the National Industrial Conference Board in l969 that was based on a random sample of US companies in 21 categories. The 302 organizations that responded ranked Maslow sixth out of 202 thinkers named as most influential in manangement circles. McGregor, Herzberg, Likert and Argeris, who were ranked as more influential than Maslow, all owed a debt to him.

I agree with Hoffman’s observation that Maslow’s theory of motivation, as embodied in the well‐known “hierarchy of needs” and the concept of “self actualization,” played a key role in revolutionizing fundamental assumptions of human nature and motivation. Especially with reference to the industrial worker, this theory has changed management thinking.

Unfortunately, Maslow’s comments on management in this volume are rudimentary: for example, communication promotes better management; T‐groups “teach intimacy” and build a sense of community; the “character” of managers and administrators needs improvement; and small enterprises and organizations are in better shape because they “intuitively” make better use of feedback than large ones. Elsewhere, in a more profound statement, Maslow recommended that top management should “tranform employees into partners” and “create social conditions” so as to merge the goals of workers and those of the enterprise.

Maslow had great impact on management by inspiring others to carry forth his concept of higher needs into systematic tools to be used by management, most directly in the form of McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y, and Likert’s System 4. In addition, Maslow’s insight led him to make penetrating remarks on McGregor’s lack of consideration for individual and societal differences, and about Likert’s implication that superior behavior in managers could be copied by subordinates. Maslow did accept, without question, Likert’s “influence pie,” which asserts that good leaders delegate power to subordinates without losing influence.

Beyond these comments, long before William Ouchi , Maslow made notes on a new “Theory Z,” which developed his idea that many people, though not all, would improve under Theory Y. Maslow’s theory unfortunately had no time to come to fruition.

My remarks are not meant to diminish the originality of Maslow’s contribution, for his role in turning around management through his new concept of motivation is secure. But a deep study of management and organizations was not Maslow’s greatest interest. There is no evidence in his writing that he had noticed some other exciting intellectual currents of his time leading more to the substance of management theories and the study of organizations. For example, current in his time were:

1. 1

   the study of group dynamics among social psychologists and the measurement of small group processes by the sociologist Robert Freed Bales; and

2. 2

   the systems approach ‐ the conceptualization of formal organizations as well as society as social systems with distinctive structures, epitomized by Chester I. Barnard’s Functions of the Executive (l938).

These two strands took the study of organizations onto new ground, but Maslow’s attention and energy were directed toward other issues. He was passionately concerned with the need to contribute to the betterment of human society in general, a subject beyond the range of this review.

One criticism: in writing that Maslow “found T‐groups (i.e. ‘sensitivity training’ groups originally developed by counselling leaders like Carl Rogers) to be extremely effective,” Hoffman suggests that both the T‐group and sensitivity training were originally developed by thinkers such as Rogers. In fact, the T‐group process began with Kurt Lewin and his staff members Ken Benne, Leland Bradford, and Ron Lippitt at a workshop for the Connecticut Interracial Commision in l946. Finding the feedback process effective and wanting to improve communication and democratic participation in small groups, Lewin’s colleages carried on the work and established NTL in l947. Rogers himself in Carl Rogers on Encounter Groups (l970) traces the T‐group to Kurt Lewin’s thinking “some time prior to l947.” Rogers wrote that his own “sensitivity training groups may resemble either T‐groups or encounter groups,” the latter used by Chicago therapists in the postwar years. What confuses matters is that Rogers had become much better known than NTL, and his term “sensitivity training” came to be used interchangeably with “T‐groups.” But Rogers rightly deserves credit for popularizing the use of the T‐group/sensitivity group methodology. (The clarification of terms comes from a conversation with Miriam Ritvo, long‐time NTL member.)

It seems to me that a true spiritual heir to Maslow’s vision of self‐actualizing individuals in synergistic relationship with a good society is the methodology and philosophy of appreciative inquiry (AI), innovated in the 1980s by David Cooperrider and others at Case Western Reserve University. The essence of AI is to discover times when individuals in an organization are functioning at their best, and to pool these recollections in order to “help ignite the imagination of what might be,” thereby to “locate, highlight and illuminate…the life‐giving forces of the organization’s existence.” By recalling the best of an organization’s collective past (good society), life‐giving forces (synergistic relationship) will be released to elevate the functioning of the organization to a higher level. Thus individuals and collectivities are able to reinforce each other’s highest achievements.

Maslow would have been gratified both at the surfacing of his unpublished papers and notes, and at the spiritual heir in AI, a method designed to realize the potentials in both individuals and the organization.