Maslow on Management

The Necessity for Enlightened Management Policies

The more evolved people get, the more psychologically healthy they get, the more will enlightened management policy be necessary in order to survive in competition and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy.

People are growing and growing, either in their actual health of personality, or in their aspirations, especially in the United States, and especially women and other underprivileged groups. The more grown people are, the worse authoritarian management will work, the less well people will function in the authoritarian situation, and the more they will hate it. Partly this comes about from the fact that when people have a choice between a high and a low pleasure, they practically always choose the high pleasure if they have previously experienced both. What this means is that people who have experienced freedom can never really be content again with slavery, even though they made no protest about the slavery before they had the experience of freedom. This is true with all higher pleasures; those people who have known the feeling of dignity and self-respect for the first time can never again be content with slavishness, even though they made no protest about it before being treated with dignity.

Treating people well spoils them for being treated badly. That is, they become much less contented ...