Maslow, Abraham (Harold) (1908–1970)

US psychologist. A professor at Brooklyn College (1937–51) and Brandeis University (1951–61), he is regarded as the founder of humanistic psychology. His seminal Motivation and Personality (1954) explicated the new humanistic model and introduced such soon-to-be standard psychological concepts as the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization. Maslow applied his pioneering theory of self-actualization to leadership, management, and organizational development in his publication Eupsychian Management (1965).

Maslow first published his theory of the hierarchy of needs in 1943, in which he argued that an ascending scale of needs should be understood to explain human motivation. Firstly there are physiological needs, or fundamental requirements for food and warmth. Once these are met, there are ‘safety needs’, such as stability, structure, and order. Further along the scale the need for love and belonging emerges; then the need for the respect of others, status, and recognition, and for self-esteem, including feelings of confidence, competence, and achievement. Ultimately, the individual achieves his/her own potential and reaches ‘self-actualization’. Maslow suggested that only a small percentage of the world's population is truly ‘self-actualizing’.

Maslow went on to study a group of people, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein, whom he felt were ‘self-actualizing’. He identified 12 characteristics that they had in common; in particular, being creative, reality-centred, and problem-centred. They also had a different way of relating to others, needing privacy, and were relatively independent of culture and environment.

Maslow made his first venture into the world of business spending a summer at a Southern California company, Non-Linear Systems, where he observed the work environment and organizational practices. He kept a diary, later published under the name of Eupsychian Management, which described his theories and ideas about ‘enlightened management’. Eupsychian described ‘the culture that would be generated by 1,000 self-actualizing people on some sheltered island where they would not be interfered with’.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of seven children in a Jewish immigrant family from Russia. He first studied law at the City College of New York before transferring to the University of Wisconsin where he received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology. A year after graduation, he returned to New York to work at Columbia University and spent time on experiments in attachment behaviour with monkeys. From 1937 he was an associate professor at Brooklyn College and then professor and chairman of the department of social psychology at Brandeis University from 1951. In 1968 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association.