Maslow on Management

Further Notes on the Relationship between Psychological Health and the Characteristics of Superior Managers (Notes from Likert)

The best managers increase the health of the workers whom they manage.

In general, what Likert is saying and proving is that under the circumstances of the researches he reports, that is, in the United States, enlightened management works best, in a pragmatic way. I suppose one could generalize this and say that American management seems to be better than management in other countries, again for the same reasons, simply that it works. Now here again, a realistic statement quite clearly would point out that there is a range of goodness of U.S. management. Most of the experiments that Likert reports compare good American managers with poor American managers, with the terms good and poor being defined pragmatically in terms of productivity, worker satisfaction, low turnover, low sickness, low absence, low labor trouble, etc.

Now a simple technique of handling this scientifically is the old process of iteration, which is a process of progressive refinement and purification by selecting out again and again, the best of the good ones. For instance, this is the way in which I constructed my personality tests of self-esteem and of emotional security (25, 53). What I did was first by the best criteria available at the time (and these were certainly not very good), ...