Thread by @edbatista

Interesting: "Having conducted an extensive search, including in the Maslow archives at the Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron in Ohio, we found no trace of Maslow framing his ideas in pyramid form." journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/am…

"While [Douglas] McGregor did much to popularize Maslow’s ideas in management, no pyramids or triangles appear in McGregor’s works. The first published triangular representation of the [hierarchy of needs] we found was in Keith Davis’s (1957) Human Relations in Business."

Of course, the problem with learning that Maslow never used a pyramid to illustrate his hierarchy of needs and that its popular adoption has led to interpretations of his ideas that are at odds with his own is that trying to convince anyone of this will be insanely difficult.

"While some benefited from the creation of Maslow’s pyramid, not everyone did. The biggest losers, we suggest, have been management students..."

"We identity three specific negative effects in this regard: that the pyramid is a poor representation of Maslow’s [hierarchy of needs]; that the preoccupation with the pyramid obscures the context within which the theory was created…"

"…and that by focusing exclusively on the pyramid, we miss the other contributions that Maslow’s thinking can make to management studies."

"It also raises the question of whether textbooks are sufficient to deliver the basics of management education, even for introductory courses. Why not also get students to read original sources, which is common practice across the social sciences?"

"After all, compared with academic journals of today, where papers are often written in a style impenetrable to all but a small number of ‘insiders,’ the writings of historical figures such as Taylor, Lewin & McGregor are accessible & digestible even by new undergraduates.”

I've learned so much from reading the pioneering psychologists and management scholars from that era. I don't take their work as gospel truth and try to be keenly aware of their biases and limitations, but it's still been a rich and rewarding education.

Returning to the paper cited above: "In the case of Maslow, this would be revealing. Students would see that he anticipated criticisms that textbooks would later make of his theory and explicitly cautioned against his ideas being interpreted in these ways..."

"Maslow did not say that the [hierarchy of needs] is unidirectional, that achieving higher levels makes you a superior being, that once a need is satisfied it no longer affects behavior, or that it applies to all people in the same way."

"Motivating employees to be more productive at work was not the end that Maslow desired for the [hierarchy of needs]. Maslow would later seek to correct this deficiency himself, with his unfinished conceptualization of Theory Z…"

"…in which he postulated that people, once economically secure, would strive for a creative and productive work life that could satisfy higher-level needs…"

"This blurred the boundaries between ‘work’ & ‘life’ in many ways prefiguring subsequent workplace initiatives where work is seen as an integral part of life."

(And THIS is where we find ourselves in the current knowledge economy, with comp & perks serving as satisficers.)

Ed Schein in 2015, quoted in the paper cited above: "It is sometimes a bit of a shock to see how much we thought we already knew 50 years ago and how little our conclusions have changed in the field of social/organizational psychology since then."

Returning to the paper: "The enormous growth in research might be obscuring insights we learned decades ago, rather than providing new ones."

"We should not need a ladder, pyramid or any other symbol to generate insights from Maslow’s thinking on the nature of human needs. Maslow’s currency was words, not figures and diagrams, and...not all good ideas come in the form of a memorable symbol or 2 x 2 matrix."

"In addition, the story of Maslow’s pyramid should cause us to reflect on how the
forms used to communicate ideas and theories convey meanings that may change the nature of those theories, or promote perspectives inconsistent with those theories."

"We should be wary of judging Maslow through the lens of today’s values, but we should at the same time recognize that a number of his ideas about race, gender and a biological elite were offensive when he said them and remain so today..."

"However, to discard Maslow completely would be a loss, because he really did practice the free and creative thinking that he believed society needed, and which Schein suggested is largely absent in academia today."

"Maslow’s original question that spurred his motivation theory was not 'How can managers motivate workers to maximize productivity and profit?' (as one might believe when seeing the pyramid in management textbooks), but 'What do we need for happiness and fulfillment in life?'"

Immense thanks to the authors @toddbridgman @strategybuild & @johnballardphd. An incredible read, well worth the time of anyone with an interest in management, leadership, psychology & history journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/am…

Further thoughts: I got interested in the history of management thinking after my first T-group @stanfordbiz in 1999. It was exciting to learn that this very Californian experience had its roots in, of all things, local race relations in 1946 Connecticut! yalom.com/tapencounterco…

But it was then dismaying to learn that T-groups (and many other manifestations of Theory Y) were wildly popular in the 1960s, only to both "die of success," as my Dad always says, and/or morph into weirdly dysfunctional versions (e.g. est).

Later on, as a novice T-group facilitator @stanfordbiz, it was even more dismaying to realize just how much had been learned AND FORGOTTEN about this particular discipline in management education. Vanished down the memory hole. amazon.com/T-Group-Theory…

As a coach to leaders & an experiential educator, I strive to keep up with current research from social psychology & neuroscience. But I ALSO keep combing the archives to see what's already been learned only to be forgotten or discarded, and there is SO MUCH to be found there. //

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