Maslow on Management

Relationship between Psychological Health and the Characteristics of Superior Managers, Supervisors, Foremen, etc. (Notes from Likert)

This is a kind of holistic thinking, or organismic thinking in which everything is related to everything else and in which what we have is not like a chain of links or like a chain of cause and effects but rather resembles a spider web or geodesic dome in which every part is related to every other part. The best way to see everything is to consider the whole darn thing one big unit.

The trouble with the first few chapters of Likert’s New Patterns of Management¹ and then, it occurs to me, with the half-dozen other books I've read on the subject of management, is that they all seem to be overlooking what is to me the clear relationship between what they’re talking about and the general conception of psychological health. For instance, I played a little game of checking off in Likert’s first few chapters all the empirically discovered characteristics of superior managers, that is managers of more productive groups or of groups of workers who were better in other things like turnover, or sick leave, or whatever. Listing all these characteristics and then putting in another column the characteristics of the supervisors found to be poor and inferior makes a clear pattern of psychological health and psychological illness, both in a rather general way. ...