Eupsychian Management

Abraham H. Maslow (1908–1970), a founder of humanistic psychology most famous for his theory of a hierarchy of human needs, developed the theory of eupsychian (good psychological) management, which creates a work environment conducive to collective psychological health.

After a lengthy study of management and a term as a visiting fellow at Non-Linear Systems, Inc., in California in 1962, Maslow reported in the opening chapter of his journal regarding the experiences that

This philosophical shift was of great importance because it recognized the institutional impact of the workplace on the psychological well-being of the individual. In some ways Maslow's recognition of this impact stimulated the use of social science in management consulting. Maslow came to believe that “Psychotherapy tends to focus too exclusively on the development of the individual, the self, the identity, etc. I have thought of creative education and now also of creative management as not only doing this for the individual but also developing him via the community, the team, the group, the organization—which is just as legitimate a path of personal growth as the autonomous paths” (Maslow 1965, 3).

Based on Maslow's reading of management theorists such as Peter Drucker (b. 1909), Rensis Likert (1903–1981), Chris Argyris (b. 1923), and Douglas McGregor (1906–1964), Maslow suggested thirtysix assumptions about people that serve as the foundation for eupsychian management in practice:

• 1
  Assume everyone is to be trusted.
• 2
  Assume everyone is to be informed as completely as possible of as many facts and truths as possible.
• 3
  Assume in all your people the impulse to achieve.
• 4
  Assume that there is no dominance-subordination hierarchy in the jungle sense or the authoritarian sense.
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• 5
  Assume that everyone will have the same ultimate managerial objectives and will identify with them no matter where they are in the organization or in the hierarchy.
• 6
  … assume good will among all the members of the organization rather than rivalry or jealousy.
• 6a
  Synergy [combined action] is also assumed.
• 7
  Assume that the individuals involved are healthy enough.
• 8
  Assume that the organization is healthy enough.
• 9
  Assume the “Ability to Admire.”
• 10
  … assume that the people in eupsychian plants are not fixated at the safety-need level.
• 11
  Assume an active trend to self-actualization.
• 12
  Assume that everyone can enjoy good teamwork, friendship, good group spirit, good group harmony, good belongingness, and group love.
• 13
  Assume hostility to be primarily reactive rather than character based.
• 14
  Assume that people can take it.
• 15
  … assume that people are improvable.
• 16
  Assume that everyone prefers to feel important, needed, useful, successful, proud, respected, rather than unimportant, interchangeable, anonymous, wasted, unused, expendable, disrespected.
• 17
  Assume that everyone prefers or perhaps even needs to love his boss (rather than to hate him), and that everyone prefers to respect his boss (rather than to disrespect him).
• 18
  Assume that everyone dislikes fearing anyone (more than he likes fearing anyone), but that he prefers fearing the boss to despising the boss.
• 19
  … assume everyone prefers to be a prime mover rather than a passive helper, a tool, a cork tossed about on the waves.
• 20
  Assume a tendency to improve things, to straighten the crooked picture on the wall, to clean up the dirty mess, to put things right, make things better, to do things better.
• 21
  Assume that growth occurs through delight and through boredom.
• 22
  Assume preference for being a whole person and not a part, not a thing or an implement, or tool, or “hand.”
• 23
  Assume the preference for working rather than being idle.
• 24
  Assume all human beings, not only eupsychian ones, prefer meaningful work to meaningless work.
• 25
  Assume the preference for personhood, uniqueness as a person, identity (in contrast to being anonymous or interchangeable).
• 26
  … assume that the person is courageous enough for eupsychian processes.
• 27
  … assume non-psychopathy (a person must have a conscience, must be able to feel shame, embarrassment, sadness, etc.).
• 28
  … assume the wisdom and the efficacy of selfchoice.
• 29
  … assume that everyone likes to be justly and fairly appreciated, preferably in public.
• 30
  … assume the defense and growth dialectic for all these positive trends that we have already listed above.
• 31
  Assume that everyone but especially the more developed persons prefer responsibility to dependency and passivity most of the time.
• 32
  … assume that people will get more pleasure out of loving than they will out of hating (although the pleasures of hating are real and should not be overlooked).
• 33
  Assume that fairly well-developed people would rather create than destroy.
• 34
  Assume that fairly well-developed people would rather be interested than be bored.
• 35
  … assume at the highest theoretical levels of eupsychian theory, a preference or a tendency to identify with more and more of the world, moving toward the ultimate of mysticism, a fusion with the world, or peak experience, cosmic consciousness, etc.
• 36
  Finally we shall have to work out the assumption of the meta-motives (the ways in which a person whose lower needs are met pursues the realization of self-actualization and the B-values) and the meta-pathologies (resulting from the lack of meeting the meta-needs), of the yearning for the “B-values,” i.e., truth, beauty, justice, perfection, and so on.

These assumptions are reflective of McGregor's Theory Y (a trusting, participative leader-follower relationship) as well as participative, democratic, enlightened, and transformational leadership. However, they are more than simply a reflection of an underlying belief about the nature of people explained by McGregor's theory. For Maslow, the uniqueness of one's humanity is expressed in the individual's pursuit of self-actualization—striving to attain the “pluralism of ultimate values” (Maslow 1965, 119). The ultimate values are a panoply perhaps best represented by a multifaceted diamond in which the whole consists of the sum of various aspects, in this case the B-values or being values: “truth, beauty, wholeness, dichotomy-transcendence, aliveness-process, uniqueness, perfection, necessity, completion, justice, order, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, and self-sufficiency” (Maslow 1971, 106). This list was derived from Maslow's research with people after a peak experience. “What you feel and perhaps ‘know’ when you gain authentic elevation as a human being … is a coming into the realization that what ‘ought to be’ is in a way that requires no longing, suggests no straining, to make it so” (Henry Geiger, cited in Maslow 1971, xvi–xvii). People often experience this state when they “are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 4).

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