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Eupsychian management and Eupsychian
management and the millennium the millennium Roy L. Payne Curtin University of Technology, Perth, W. Australia 219 Keywords Self-actualization, Human resource management, Organizational performance, Motivation Abstract The article introduces the Utopian vision of managing people at work described in Abraham Maslow's book Eupsychian Management. This essentially foresees a time when organizations are managed by self-actualising people along lines which would encourage the self- actualisation of people from all levels of the organization. Maslow's vision was that this would lead to really effective organizations and a much improved society. The article considers how far such movements as quality of working life, TQM, empowerment and autonomous working groups have moved us towards this sort of management practice. There are definite moves in this direction but considerable constraints on making the practice universal, even though there is growing empirical evidence that positive human resource practices lead to improved efficiency and effectiveness.
The invitation to write something about management in the millennium
inevitably led me to make connections with novelty and idealism. Abraham Maslow's book Eupsychian Management quickly came to mind (Maslow, 1965). Eupsychia was coined by Maslow and defined as, ``the culture that would be generated by 1,000 self-actualising people on some sheltered island where they would not be interfered with''. Eupsychian Management was about what it would mean if business and other large organizations took seriously Maslow's hierarchy of needs and organised around the key notion that, if conditions are right, then undamaged human beings naturally strive to become ``self- actualising''. Despite the fact that Maslow's hierarchy of needs forms part of every textbook dealing with work motivation, Eupsychian Management itself hardly sold its first printing and never again appeared in the management titles list. It was what Carl Jung would call an example of synchronicity that, having opted to write this piece, I came across an advert for a book called Maslow on Management, published in 1998. This turned out to be a reissue of Eupsychian Management with the addition of extracts of interviews with CEOs, academics and management gurus who have been influenced by Maslow's works. In this essay I describe the key implications of Maslow's ideas on managing people and organizations. I then consider how far they have been implemented, and ask whether things are likely to be different in the first years of the millennium.
The hierarchy of needs and the practice of management
Turning the approach of clinical psychology/psychiatry on its head, Maslow set out to research and understand people who were abnormally normal, i.e. Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 15 No. 3, 2000, pp. 219-226. super healthy in a psychological sense. He sought out people who were # MCB University Press, 0268-3946 Journal of achieving a lot, were happy with themselves and their lives, and who were Managerial ``fully functioning''. From studying such people he proposed that human needs Psychology had a hierarchical structure with the most basic need being to satisfy one's physiological requirements for food, drink etc. Once these are adequately 15,3 satisfied the next set of needs become the motivating force: needs for safety/ security. Once a person feels secure then they become more interested in their 220 social needs and strive to become accepted by those around them. Once socially accepted, people strive to be esteemed within the eyes of other people, and when these needs have been satisfied they become more concerned with being esteemed by themselves and strive to become self-actualising. The amount of satisfaction of any of the needs varies across individuals, so some people never feel secure enough to want to enter a social group whilst others require quite minimal levels of security, and the same applies to all the needs. Maslow observed that many people spend their lives struggling to satisfy the lower order needs and never get the opportunity to satisfy their higher order needs for self-esteem and self-actualisation. Eupsychian Management was written as a journal in the summer of 1962, having spent that summer in a high tech Californian organization at the invitation of the CEO who was interested in Maslow's work. What excited Maslow was the realisation that employment potentially provided people with the opportunity to become self-actualising: an even greater opportunity than the education system itself ± ``a Utopian or revolutionary technique'' (Maslow, 1998, p. 1). The technique is perhaps both utopian and revolutionary for it requires getting managers of organizations to answer ``yes'' to the following questions and then to manage people, design their organization, use their technology and their human resource systems in accordance with the beliefs: . Do you believe people are trustworthy? . Do you believe that people seek responsibility and accountability? . Do you believe that people seek meaning in their work? . Do you believe that people naturally want to learn? . Do you believe that people don't resist change but they resist being changed? . Do you believe that people prefer work to being idle? Maslow was, of course, influenced by McGregor (1960), but he elaborates on these principles in a chapter entitled ``Enlightened economics and management'' where he lists 36 assumptions that enlightened managers need to make. All are consistent with the above values but Maslow's ultimate vision is encapsulated in the last two assumptions, which are combined here: We must assume at the highest theoretical levels of enlightened management 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. a yearning for truth, beauty, justice, perfection and so on (Maslow, 1998, p. 42). It was Maslow's belief that organizing in accordance with these assumptions Eupsychian was not just good for improving people's health and well-being, but good for management and the financial success of the organisation, and for the society as a whole. the millennium Although these ideas are Utopian, Maslow was enough of a pragmatist, acknowledging the influence of John Dewey on his thinking, to recognise the barriers that exist in organisations: he talks about the importance of ``fitting to the objective requirements of the objective situation'' (Maslow, 1998, p. 91). 221 Maslow sees the lack of self-actualisation in many managers as being a barrier to achieving this fit, because authoritarianism and lack of openness make it difficult to truly identify what the objective requirements of the objective situation are. His more comprehensive list of barriers includes: scarcity of goods/rewards; failure to satisfy basic needs; antisynergic organizational regulations/laws; things that increase anxiety; loss or separation of any kind; forcing change on the fearful; bad communication; suspicion; denial of truth; dishonesty, untruth, lying, vulgarization of the truth, confusion of the lines between truth and falsehood; loss of freedom, self-esteem, status, respect, love objects, being loved, belonging, safety, physiological needs, value systems, truth, beauty etc. The solution to removing these barriers is to have self- actualising managers: ``I would expect that if the management policy were truly growth fostering, and truly better personality producing, that these individuals would, for instance, become more philanthropic in their communities, more ready to help, more unselfish and altruistic, more indignant at injustice, more ready to fight for what they thought to be true and good etc.'' (Maslow, 1998, p. 107). An increase in a person's self-actualisation increases the chances of enhancing another's self-actualisation in a virtuous circle, but this depends on providing satisfaction of their physical, safety and social needs for the development of the higher order needs to occur. This development will not occur if organizations create lousy jobs and Maslow recognised that large organizations in particular end up with many lousy jobs. This problem is never really solved by Maslow but his hope is that its worst effects will be alleviated by people volunteering themselves for such jobs, and also the increased recognition of their contribution due to the increase in colleaguehood that enlightened management would bring, so that we could all be affectionately grateful to ``the morons in the world, people who are willing to do the garbage collecting, the dirty work, the repetitive work etc.'' (Maslow, 1998, p 287). As Warren Bennis notes in his Foreword to Maslow on Management, Abe is not always politically correct, but is always bold. For Maslow's ``Very superior boss'' to exist in Eupsychia, ``it seems very clear that, the ability to admire, the ability to follow, the ability to choose the most efficient leader, the ability to detect factual superiority, all these are needed in order for any culture to work, and they must all go together with a minimum of antagonism and hostility to the superiors'' (Maslow, 1998, p. 182). Journal of While these sentiments may seem less than totally democratic Maslow was Managerial convinced of their fundamental truth, and in 1962 he predicted that the end to Psychology the Cold War would come about when it was clear to all that America turns out a better average citizen than Russia. 15,3 Eupsychian management at the millennium 222 Well the Cold War is over and capitalism at least seems to have been widely accepted as having played an important part, though its deficiencies are currently being probed in such books as Lester Thurow's The Future of Capitalism (1996) and Charles Handy's The Hungry Spirit (1997). While Handy does not refer to Eupsychian management, his concept of proper selfishness as a basis for achieving spirituality in society is very similar to Maslow's notion of synergy where the selfish pursuit of one's own ends ultimately serves the ends of others through the commitment to brotherhood or colleaguehood. In recognising the economic progress derived from free market economics Handy highlights its limitations in a very Maslow-like way: ``Utlimately, we need a new understanding of life, one that gives money its due, but no more than its due'' (Handy, 1997, p. 60). Handy sets the achievements against a background of increasing part-time employment which is up from 21 per cent in 1985 to 24 per cent in 1995, self- employment which is up from 11 per cent to 13 per cent in the same decade, and permanent employment which is down from 84 per cent to 82 per cent (Great Britain). The trends are predicted to continue. Unscheduled absenteeism in the USA reached the highest level for seven years in 1998, up to 2.9 per cent from 2.3 per cent in 1997, with absences due to family problems accounting for 26 per cent, and stress 16 per cent, which is almost three times the rate in 1995. At the same time, a survey of 646 North American vice presidents showed that over half of the companies they managed were understaffed and that both absence and turnover had increased as a result (McShulskis, 1997). In response to these staffing shortages, 57 per cent are hiring temporary employees, up from 53 per cent the previous year; 51 per cent have redistributed work and 40 per cent have increased overtime. A total of 61 per cent report a lack of applicants with proper skills. In Canada a survey by the Canadian Health Monitor found that white-collar workers reported greater work stress than their blue collar counterparts though the latter are more likely to be absent from stress. Over 50 per cent of the blue-collar workers said they had lost more than 13 days of work in the previous year whilst the percentage for white-collar workers was 33 per cent (Fernberg, 1998). In a survey of over 18,000 workers from all levels, the Australian Industrial Relations Workplace Survey found that between 40 per cent and 65 per cent all levels of employee reported increases in the pace of work, the effort they had to expend to do the work, and their stress from work during the last year (Morehead et al., 1997). These outcomes seem more the result of economic rationalism than Eupsychian management, though some popular trends in management during the last 40 years should have nourished its assumptions. The most international approach is the Quality of Working Life movement Eupsychian which started in the 1950s but blossomed in Western Europe and North management and America in the 1960s and 1970s. Walton (1974) listed these guiding principles: the millennium adequate and fair compensation; a safe and healthy working environment; jobs that developed people's capacities; personal and career enhancement; a workplace high on social integration; the constitutional protection of employees' rights; integration of work and life outside the workplace; 223 responsibility to the community and local environment. The 1980s saw the same set of ideas marketed as employee involvement, which added the importance of empowerment and access to information for decision-making. These were claimed to be the characteristics of ``High performing organizations''. Lawler et al. (1995) surveyed the Fortune 1,000 companies in 1987, 1990 and 1993 and showed that the number of companies using the ideas and the proportion of the workforce exposed to them increased over that period. The evidence is generally supportive that these practices do lead to greater employee commitment and motivation and hence productivity and effectiveness, though the gains are modest in scale in most instances (Cummings and Worley, 1997). These trends to increase employee involvement were further boosted by the adoption of total quality management (TQM) systems, which had been very successfully developed by the Japanese manufacturing organizations in the 1970s. Although there are important technical aspects to TQM, the psychology of encouraging workers to see themselves as service providers to others (their customers) with the goal to continuously improve that service necessitated participation, involvement and innovations which were publicly rewarded. All have the characteristics of satisfying the higher order needs for esteem and growth. As with most organizational interventions, the evidence for their efficacy is mixed, but Powell (1995) compared TQM adopters with non- adopters in a sample of 54 organizations and found the adopters outperformed the non-adopters. The conclusion was drawn that the difference was not attributable to the tools and techniques of TQM, but to the cultural change towards empowerment and commitment associated with it: ``these tacit resources and not TQM tools and techniques drive TQM success, and organizations that acquire them can outperform competitors without the accompanying TQM ideology'' (Powell, 1995, p. 36). On the other hand, Argyris (1998) questions the success of empowerment programs in an article sub-titled, ``The emperor's new clothes''. Two other philosophies of work design were also widely adopted during the last 20 years. They are job design and autonomous work groups/self-managing teams. Job design involves creating jobs which require a range of skills, are meaningful tasks which have some overall identity for the worker, and then giving them the necessary autonomy to be responsible for the quality achievement of the tasks. The final design element was feedback of results so that the worker could learn from mistakes and improve their performance (Hackman and Oldham, 1980). Providing autonomy and control is obviously Journal of important in creating self-managing teams too. The team is given Managerial responsibility for a whole product or service and allowed to determine what Psychology they do, how they do it, how much they aim for, who does what and when. Members of the team learn most jobs and move around them regularly to 15,3 provide flexibility and personal development. The published evidence for both interventions is generally favourable, showing improvements in productivity, 224 quality and cost reductions, though there are large differences across studies in the size of these improvements, and none at all in about 30 per cent of the studies. Macy et al. (1994) concluded from a meta-analysis of 131 studies that the improvements tended to be larger if they were accompanied by changes in information systems, reward systems and performance management systems. One of the most comprehensive and convincing arguments for the philosophy of building success through the correct management of people is stated by Jeffrey Pfeffer (1998) in a book entitled The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. Pfeffer has assembled a great deal of evidence to support the claim in the title. Despite this well advertised body of evidence he argues that only about 12 per cent of organizations will do what is required to build profits by putting people first. Short-term financial pressures, managerial norms about being tough and analytical, failure to delegate, and the inadvertant destruction of competence and wisdom because of these, are the main barriers. In a study of small to medium size British manufacturing organizations, Patterson et al. (1998) found little evidence amongst managers for investing in designing jobs and systems to develop their employees, though the study found such practices were strongly linked to organisational performance. At least in well informed organizations there have been moves towards improving the conditions for self-actualisation during the last 40 years. How many got close to Eupsychia is impossible to judge, but probably none as an entire organization. It is possible that at the height of the Japanese miracle large companies there came close to providing the personal growth, social integration and societal contribution that Maslow predicted, but harsh economic realities have changed even that successful model, and many Japanese workers now suffer very high levels of stress and reduced job security. The strong identification with the organization required in the Japanese culture might also have limited self-actualisation as conceived by Maslow.
Eupsychian management in the millennium
In many Western economies the gap between the rewards paid to top managers and those paid to lower levels of employee has increased enormously in the last ten years. Such developments seem inconsistent with the culture of colleagueship that Maslow suggested would follow the creation of self- actualising environments, though it seems reasonable to conclude that many top managers are in self-actualising environments: they create them. The downsizing trend has slowed but is accompanied by greater use of contract workers, and part-time workers. Organizations are unlikely to invest in such Eupsychian people by creating self-actualising opportunities. The increased opportunities management and this creates for entrepreneurial activity, however, may lead to more people the millennium generating their own self-actualisation. Perhaps such smaller companies can create Eupsychia more easily than large business and government. While technology has partly encouraged downsizing, it opens up opportunities for self-development which are not dependent on being employed, though it has 225 helped to create self-actualising opportunities at work too. It can also be used to increase control of people at work, or even on a contract ± such uses are anti Eupsychian. Eupsychia depends on the choices made by powerful people in powerful organizations and the portents are not good. There are managers making choices based on a more spiritual approach to people and the examples and justification for their success are convincingly described in Dorothy Marcic's (1997) book, Managing with the Wisdom of Love. However, it is a very short book. In an epilogue to The Hungry Spirit Handy presents the year 2097 like this: ``Global communications and a global economy will bring global fortunes to those few who can succeed in a fiercely competitive world. It is a world in which the best are everywhere and the rest are nowhere'' (Handy, 1997, p. 253). In looking at a more positive possible future he clings to the notion that, ``The workplace has always been the real school for life. Perhaps it needs to change its curriculum a little to tune in with the new age of personal initiative'' (Handy, 1997, p. 262). Apart from the fact that the workplace does not exist for large numbers of unemployed people, it seems a little change in the curriculum of global organizations is unlikely to bring about the changes proposed by Maslow or Marcic. The island of Eupsychia never existed. It will take a change of volcanic force to create it in the next 100 years and a revolution in mankind to create it across continents. It is some consolation that the concept of Utopia persists. References. Argyris, C. (1998), ``Empowerment: the emperor's new clothes'', Harvard Business Review, May- June, pp. 98-105. Cummings, T.G. and Worley, C.G. (1997), Organization Development and Change, 6th ed., West Publishing Co., St. Paul, MN. Fernberg, P.M. (1998), ``Stress: hidden source of lost time'', Occupational Hazards, Vol. 60 No. 6, pp. 76-80. Hackman, J.R. and Oldham, G. (1980), Work Redesign, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Handy, C. (1997), The Hungry Spirit, Arrow, London. Lawler, E.E.I., Mohrman, S. and Ledford, G. (1995), Creating High Performance Organizations, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Macy, B., Bliese, P. and Norton, J. (1994), ``Organizational change and work innovation: a meta- analysis of 131 N. American field experiments ± 1961-1990, in Woodman, R. and Pasmore, W. (Eds), Research in Organizational Change and Development, Vol. 7, JAI Press, Greenwich, CT. Journal of Marcic, D. (1997), Managing with the Wisdom of Love: Uncovering Virtue in People and Organizations, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Managerial Maslow, A.H. (1998), Maslow on Management, J. Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. Psychology Maslow, H. (1965), Eupsychian Management: A Journal, Irwin, Homewood, IL. 15,3 McGregor, D. (1960), The Human Side of Enterprise, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. McShulskis, E. (1997), ``Record number of companies say they are understaffed'', HR Magazine, 226 Vol. 42 No. 4, pp. 26-9. Morehead, A., Steele, M., Alexander, M., Stephen, K. and Duffin, L. (1997), Changes at Work: The 1995 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, Longman, Melbourne. Patterson, M.G., West, M.A., Lawthom, R. and Nickell, S. (1998), Impact of People Management Practices on Business Performance, Vol. 22, Institute of Personnel and Development, London. Pfeffer, J. (1998), The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Powell, T. (1995), ``Total quality management as a competitive advantage: a review and empirical study'', Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 16, pp. 15-37. Thurow, L. (1996), The Future of Capitalism, Nicholas Brealey, London. Walton, R. (1974), ``Improving the quality of working life'', Harvard Business Review, Vol. 52, May-June, pp. 54-7.
George R. Zanghi v. The Incorporated Village of Old Brookville, The Old Brookville Police Department, John Kenary and Kenneth Wile, 752 F.2d 42, 2d Cir. (1985)