Maslow on Management

Memorandum on Enlightened Management

The most tough-minded person in the world would have to draw the same conclusion as the most tender-minded person in the world from these data: that a certain kind of democratic manager makes more profit for the firm as well as making everybody happier and healthier.

Point out the parallel between Dove’s experiments on superior chickens (p. 121 in Maslow 70) and the new literature on superior supervisors. In the case of the chickens, the superiors were found to be superior in every way, i.e., they had healthier feathers and healthier combs, they laid better eggs and more of them, they were heavier and stronger, they were higher in the pecking order, and they chose spontaneously by free choice a better diet for physical health when put in the cafeteria situation. When this dietary which was chosen by the superior chickens was forced upon the inferior chickens, these inferior chickens improved in all the mentioned qualities to some extent. That is, they got heavier and they laid better eggs; they rose in the pecking hierarchy and they had more sexual contacts, etc., etc. But they never rose as high in these qualities as the innately superior chickens. They went about 50 percent of the way up.

The first researches on supervision were like this kind of naturalistic observation. It was found, for instance, in Jim Clark’s¹ studies or in many of ...