Maslow on Management by Abraham H. Maslow

Author:Abraham H. Maslow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-11-09T07:23:26.731000+00:00

Notes on Leadership

. . . the person who seeks power for power, is the one who is just exactly likely to be the one who shouldn 't have it. Such people are apt to use power very badly; to overcome, overpower, use it Jor their own selfish gratifications.

am dissatisfied with the material on leadership in the management literature; I think again there's some tendency, as in McGregor, to be pious about the democratic dogma, rather than using the objective requirements of the situation as the centering point or organizing point for leadership. I think the way that I'll approach it will be from the point of view of the perfect (paradigmatic) situation, or the enlightened situation, in which the objective requirements of the situation, or of the task, or of the problem, or of the group reign absolutely and in which there are practically no other determinants. This would then provide an answer to the question, Who is the best leader for this particular situation? In this paradigmatic situation, I would have to assume very good cognition of the skills, talents, and abilities of every single person in the group, of one's self as well as others. I would also assume a totally innocent Bcognition (89) of all the relevant details of the problem situation. I would also assume healthy characters in all the people involved (so that there would not be too much sensitivity, or feeling insulted or hurt, or of anybody having such weak self-esteem or weak ego that he has to be handled delicately or diplomatically and with lies, politeness, etc.). I would also then have to assume in this perfect situation that the task, problem, or purpose was totally introjected by everybody in the situation; that is to say, that the task or duty was not any longer something separate from the self, something out there, outside the person and different from him, but rather that he identified with this task so strongly that you couldn't define his real self without including that task.

A good example to use here is the man who loves his work and is absorbed in it and who enjoys it so much that he can hardly think of himself apart from it. If I am a psychologist and I love psychology and I was born to be a psychologist and I get total satisfaction out of it, etc., etc., then it becomes totally meaningless to try to imagine me not being a psychologist-I would simply not be the same person. I might not even be a person in the fullest sense of the word if this were amputated from me. Well, this kind of total identification with the task or the duty is an aspect of B-psychology (86) that people probably aren't ready for yet, so I'd better figure out easier ways of communicating it. It's difficult because it jumps the dichotomy between work and play, between a person and his labor, between the self and nonpsychological reality, etc. The concept

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