Humanistic Management

Humanistic management is a philosophy of management that emphasizes the interests of the employee in the manager-employee partnership. It is inclusive of a number of more specific theories that place a high value on human growth, potential, and dignity. In fact, humanistic managers don’t restrict fair and respectful treatment to employees alone, but rather, they accord this treatment to other stakeholders, such as customers, clients, vendors, and other members of the organizational community as well. They tend to maintain awareness of all organizational stakeholders rather than solely or mainly the shareholders or themselves at the expense of other stakeholders. Humanistic managers care how they accomplish organizational goals. They favor ethical codes for their organizations and pursue policies of global corporate social responsibility, including ensuring the human dignity of their workers in undeveloped countries and protecting the global environment. They work to ensure organizational and interpersonal justice for and among their stakeholders as well. Generally, they seek to belong or attend to professional and global associations with developed standards supporting and upholding human dignity, such as Social Accountability 8000 (SA8000), Fairtrade International, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26000, Corporate Accountability International, and others.

They endorse principles of sustainability, such as those promoted by groups like Forestethics or the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and Global Compact initiatives. They welcome triple bottom-line reporting of some sort, in reference to the organization’s value to stakeholders (people), the global natural environment (planet), and to society at large (profit to society in the sense of economic output exceeds economic input resulting in overall benefit to society). Thus, humanistic management’s central insight is that all stakeholders—employees, customers, clients, shareholders, vendors, local and global communities—need to be treated with dignity and sensitivity if economic and environmental sustainability is to exist. However, it is difficult for a manager to operate humanistically unless the entire organization promotes a culture of humanism and organizational learning. This entry is focused on describing the fundamental principles of humanistic management, tracing its origins and the various theories associated with it, and examining its probable future as a management theory for widespread use in the 21st century.