Eupsychian Management in the Age of the Knowledge Worker

Introduction

After over 30 years from its initial printing, Abraham Maslow’s journal on eupsychian management was summoned back to the world of business in 1998 when it was published once again in a book called Maslow on Management. A shinning testimony to its value, Maslow’s original journal was kept intact, providing a new generation of managers with an opportunity to revisit Maslow’s ideas on enlightened management and apply them to a new world of business challenges. Responding to the publication of the new edition, Warren Bennis (1998), a colleague and friend of Maslow’s, said,

The problems organizations face today are far more vexing than the problems they had to address in the 1960s: globalization, intense competitiveness, galloping technology, change/change/change . . . Maybe our throats or even our minds are now ready for Maslow’s profound medicine. (p. ix)

Even with such daunting challenges, business leaders like Mort Merverson, a former chair and chief executive officer at Perot Systems, responded to the ideas and value of Maslow’s eupsychian management journal saying,

The book is stunning . . . the papers he wrote that summer and the basic thoughts contained therein were not 1950s thinking . . . If we do not deal with the whole employee or the life of the employee then we are dealing only with part of the power or creativity of the person. (Maslow et al., 1998, p. 30)

Maslow’s views on enlightened management, which blossomed during a summer-long visit to nonlinear systems in 1962, drew from the influences of two equally prominent theorists of the 20th century, Douglas McGregor and Peter F. Drucker. It was through the collective ideas of Maslow, McGregor, and Drucker, that Nonlinear systems developed a desire and commitment to apply a participative approach to management based on theories from these influential theorists. If applied consistently across the organization, nonlinear systems believed they were on track to creating a climate of employee satisfaction, increased productivity, and creativity under conditions where employees had indefinite opportunities for self-direction and self-control (Malone, 1975).

For many of the topics that Maslow discussed on eupsychian management, Maslow relied on the insights provided by Douglas McGregor and his Theory X and Theory Y theories of motivation and management. However, he also relied on the management views of Peter Drucker (1954) as defined in his classic The Practice of Management. Drucker’s primary thesis was that business could realize operational success by establishing a mutually agreed on set of objectives between management and employees. Often referred to as MBO, many business organizations adopted Drucker’s strategic model of management, including a wide range of American companies. Maslow considered Drucker’s idea of MBO important, and he believed it would help management push decision making and accountability down through the lower ranks of the organization and elevate productivity and motivate employees in ways that could be subsequently measured. Bennis (1998) observed that Maslow was one of the first to embrace the idea that organizations like nonlinear could “serve as the new laboratory for the study of psycho-dynamics, of high human development, of the ecology for the human being” (p. viii). Bennis (1998) also believed that Maslow’s efforts at nonlinear created opportunities to carry on the conversation about answering two of the biggest questions Maslow had posed in his journal. “How good a society does human nature permit?” and “How good a human nature does society permit?” (p. ix).

In 1965, the same year that Maslow published his original journal, the experiment at nonlinear Systems began to falter. The company felt it necessary to respond to overwhelming financial pressures and retreated to a more conventional organization based on a modified method of command and control. As to the legitimacy of its success or failure, the experiment in participative management continued to receive praise and interest from “scientists, writers, educators, engineers, consultants and representatives of governments and industries from all parts of the world” (Malone, 1975, p. 52). In discussing the success of nonlinear systems Alden (2012) said, “Unlike many other experiments with Theory Y management of the era, Kay’s reforms touched every level of his organization, and were widely heralded as some of the most successful experiments of their kind” (p. 394).

Aware of the circumstances, Maslow (1965) remained persistent in his belief that if a company embraced his utopian, eupsychian, ethical, and moral recommendations, noticeable improvement could be realized, including profits. Maslow (1965) viewed management theory an important part of his beliefs in helping companies realize notable economic productivity and to ensure the “psychological health of the workers, their movement toward self-actualization, their increase in safety, belongingness, loyalty, ability to love, self-respect, etc.” (p. 78).

Often less emphasized, but equally important, was Maslow’s (1965) realization that there was more work to be done stating,

sometime in the future we will have to deal with more subtle aspects of long-term, enlightened management, democratic holistic society economics, in at least this sense: A healthy business assumes all sorts of things that we haven’t yet spoken about. (p. 210)

It included a realization that companies should not be a place where scientific psychological knowledge was to be applied, instead he encouraged the workplace to become a “life-laboratory,” a source of knowledge where the study of “psychodynamics, high human development, ideal ecology for the human being” could be studied (Maslow, 1965, p. 2).

However, in the early 1970s, the landscape of American business underwent significant changes in the makeup of its workforce. The manual-labor workforce of industrial institutions that Maslow had become so familiar with became less important and a new kind of worker, often referred to the “knowledge worker” began to establish itself as a powerful economic force. The concept of the knowledge worker can be traced to the publication of a mid-20th century book on business management and authored by Peter Drucker called Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New “Post-Modern” World, which was published in 1959. It was in this publication that Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker.” Visionary in its tone, Drucker predicted the rise of the knowledge worker and argued that knowledge work had become a more crucial economic resource than land, labor, or financial assets. Until Drucker’s death in 2005, he would spend the rest of life refining the definition of what it meant to be a knowledge worker promoting the conceptual idea as the next frontier of management (Davenport, 2005). According to Nickols (2016), “No one paid more attention to the shift to knowledge work or the rise of knowledge worker than Peter Drucker” (p. 1). It was Drucker (1959) who believed the knowledge worker would become “the central resource of today’s society and would provide the “true measure of its economic, its military and even its political potential” (p. 114).

Because of Maslow’s untimely death in June 1970, we will never know how Maslow might have responded to such proclamations. Few, if any, knowledge-intensive organizations existed during his lifetime. And despite this significant shift in the landscape of American business, evidence suggests that Maslow would have had little difficulty in applying his conceptual ideas of eupsychian management policy to the knowledge worker and to the organizations in which they worked. A review of the 36 assumptions that Maslow (1965) described in the eupsychian management journal shows that many of Maslow’s assumptions find themselves well-represented among knowledge workers. Assumptions such as “everyone to be trusted,” “impulse to achieve,” “good will among all the members” represent just a few seen critical to the success of any knowledge-intensive organization (pp. 17, 19).

In my 30-year career as a knowledge worker, I spent most of my time managing people. There were many starts and stops, and through all of them, I committed myself to developing my skills as a manager and the skills of the people who surrounded me. I chose to develop my managerial skills and effectiveness, by obtaining advanced degrees in management and organizational psychology. To tell my personal story, I relied on the autoethnographic methods as defined by Andrew Herrmann (2017). While there are several outstanding autoethnographic texts from other scholars such as Bochner (2014) and Adams et al. (2015), it was Andrew Herrmann (2017) who became the most relevant to my story telling. Andrew Herrmann represents one of the few scholars to apply autoethnography techniques in examining the intersection of workers and organizations.

In the first phase of my professional business journey, I discuss my work experiences as a consultant. The second phase of my journey reflects a person searching for the self. In the final phase of my journey, I share my reflections working as a manager for one the most storied companies in the history of Silicon Valley that moved to another state in 2020. My career in business as a knowledge worker began at a time when many of my coworkers contended with similar challenges as my own in the workplace. It was a time when organizations and society began experiencing a pronounced influence of computer technology in almost every aspect of everyday life. It was a time when mass company layoffs became a way of life with its genesis traceable to the actions of Ronald Reagan who fired 11,359 air traffic controllers on August 5, 1981.

A Place to Hang One’s Hat

It was the early 1980s, and I stood in the doorway of a large office with panoramic windows that consumed its outermost dimensions. Toward the opposite end stood a smiling executive who rose from her wooden desk to greet me with a firm handshake. As we walked together around the lengthy floor for a set of first-day introductions, everywhere I looked was a sea of cubicles. Although I did not know it, my role on the project was that of a knowledge worker. I was there to write about customized software applications designed by software engineers that responded to the specific needs of Fortune 500 companies. The organization where I worked was a newly minted strategic software division created by the largest telecommunications company in the world. I was familiar with the telecommunications company from a distance, but I did not know that I was about to become part of a business culture with a long and storied history. In a 1996 article published in The Washington Post, the company was described in the following way:

No enterprise had more employees, more customers or more shareholders. Its cadre of scientists gave us talking films in the 1930s, much of the radar that helped win World War II, the circuitry that carried the astronauts’ voices back from the moon and the transistors and lasers of the information age. (Russakoff & Pearlstein, 1996)

By the time I started working, the project was already underway, and it felt like I was stepping onto a treadmill that had already been set in motion. I had no choice but to start strong, and sometimes I felt like I could not go fast enough. Like most software engineering projects I worked on over the years, achieving project milestones and meeting deadlines implied extreme levels of personal sacrifice for everyone involved. It was a workplace filled with ambiguity, high levels of stress, and long workdays. A typical workweek for most of us often exceeded 80 hours.

Overshadowing the extraordinary efforts of everyone working on the project was the unwelcome awareness of company layoffs. Today, layoffs have become an accepted business practice, but in the early 1980s, laying off employees in large numbers, had only just begun. Gone was “the era of the company man, in which workers could reasonably expect to remain employed by the same organization for the bulk of their careers” (Todd, 2019).

As the project progressed, the thought of seeing colleagues leave through the process of job elimination weighed heavily on everyone’s minds, including mine. No one working on the project was willing or ready to accept such a fate. In a broad-based study conducted by Louis Uchitelle (2007), an interview was conducted with Dr. Kim Cameron, an organizational psychologist at the University of Michigan in which Dr. Cameron declared, “that no matter how sophisticated the technique, there is not much balm: layoffs are destructive psychologically for the individuals who lose their jobs . . . Layoffs are the opposite of life giving; they literally deplete life” (p. 181).

As my initial assignment drew to a close, part of the engineering efforts associated with it included a visit to a customer site in New York City’s financial district. As a token of appreciation for all the hard work, members of the team, including me, flew to New York City to visit with one of the customers and hand over the production-ready software to them. After completing the customer visit, management gave all us some free time to attend a Broadway show and eat at some of the best restaurants in New York City. I was grateful for the opportunity to partake in such a wonderful experience. However, the most important event for me was when I walked into a bookstore with a colleague and stumbled on the writings of Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton was an American Trappist monk and a writer who died tragically in 1968. His clear prose and spiritual sensibilities spoke to me. His writings suggested that there was something that I might want to consider for spiritual and personal enrichment. Merton’s writings had placed me on a higher plane of personal awareness, a path of greater meaning in my work and in my life. Many of Merton’s writings touched my soul, and I became intrigued by the growing restlessness portrayed in Merton’s (1948) autobiography called The Seven Story Mountain. It was Merton (1974) who had provided a fresh path for self-discovery when he said,

Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that itself, fully awake, fully active, and fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant source. (Merton, 1974, p. 1)

After management handed over the production-ready software to the customer, the announcements began to go out regarding significant company layoffs, and they were picked up by major newspapers across the United States. The New York Times described the elimination of 24,000 jobs as an “effort to streamline the company, reduce costs, and increase profits” (“AT&T unit details layoffs,” 1985). It was a phrase that I would hear repeatedly throughout my career as a knowledge worker. A sobering mood made its way across the office floor where I worked, and I remember feeling saddened as I had watched selected employees carry their office belongings to their cars after management notified them, they no longer had a job. While I was not in any imminent risk of losing my position, the uncertainty of the situation suggested to me it would be best to start considering other opportunities. A few months later, I interviewed for a management position in Silicon Valley and accepted an offer to leave the company and move to California.

Searching

When I arrived in Silicon Valley in June 1987, I spent the first 3 months in a hotel room until I could find a more permanent place to live. Open vacancies for apartments were less than 1%, so I had to rely on relocation services to help me find a vacancy. At the time of my arrival, the demand for knowledge workers in Silicon Valley far exceeded the supply, and most companies, including startups, practiced very aggressive hiring tactics offering potential candidates all kinds of perks to meet a company’s hiring needs. The position I accepted differed from my last position as I had become a manager. My general responsibilities included managing a team of professional writers who had already established themselves in other professions such as academia, journalism, and computer science. As a manager, the switch from an individual contributor to management required I develop skills emphasizing interpersonal communication and group development.

After 2 years of working as a manager, I became restless once again, and I began listening to other employment opportunities outside the company. My curiosity finally got the better of me, and it led to a decision to leave the company for a lucrative business offer at one of the many startups. While I was happy about the new opportunity, I did not expect that such a decision would trigger a series of career moves that consumed the next 10 years of my life. Before I realized what happened, I lost touch with whom I was a person. Returning to 80-hour work weeks and commuting into Silicon Valley for almost ten years had taken its toll on me. According to Alvesson (2004), “Despite the comparatively high status of knowledge workers, their self-esteem is not always easy to safeguard in an ambiguous, fluid, and image-sensitive, ‘substance-weak’ world” (p. 191). Something was missing from my life, and I felt lost.

Responding to this personal challenge I found myself in, one of the first actions I took was to enroll in an advanced degree program in management. It was a management program that explored the theoretical framework of systems thinking and the learning organization as defined by Peter Senge (1990). An important part of the program included in-depth peer interaction, shared learning, and the building of a cohesive learning team by exploring the dynamics of interpersonal communication and group development. The program affiliated itself with the well-known National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine, otherwise known as NTL. Because of this affiliation, part of my learning involved taking part in T-Group sensitivity training similar to what Abraham Maslow had done and wrote about in his journal on eupsychian management in the 1960s. By participating in T-Group training, I had become a participant of a learning group that had no structure, lacked predictability, and control. When I look back on my experiences in a T-Group, I found Maslow’s (1965) description of a T-Group similar to my own, especially when he said,

there are some kinds of things that can happen in these T-Groups that can never happen in the individual psychoanalysis, no matter how long it takes. There are certain kinds of feedback we can get from other people that we simply cannot get from just one person, even if he [Therapist] becomes active rather than passive or nondirective. (p. 159)

Maslow (1965) believed the T-Group served as a unique platform where the “need is not so much personal therapy of the psychiatric sort, which implies psychiatric sickness, but rather personal development or psychology or self-actualization training or something of the sort” (p. 182).

Overall, my learning experiences in the advanced learning program helped me to reflect on many aspects of my behavior as a manager. It also fostered a deeper interest in wanting to understand the psychology of individual. From my perspective, I had witnessed too many times how an individual in a group could undermine the cohesiveness of a team. Learning and listening skills became increasingly important to me, so I enrolled in a PhD program in psychology.

Respect for the Individual and Self-Transcendence

By the late 1990s, the effects of my educational experiences affected my outlook in the workplace. I continued to achieve success as a people manager, but sensitivity to my personal feelings and a sense of urgency grew. I wanted to work for a company that aligned more closely with my personal values. During a lunch meeting with a close friend, I received encouragement to consider working for one of the most respected companies in Silicon Valley. Established in 1939, the company started in a garage in Palo Alto, California, and considered by many to be the birthplace of Silicon Valley. During our conversation, we discussed the company’s core values and beliefs, and what caught my attention was a value expressed by one of the company’s cofounders in an interview with Collins and Porras (1991) stating,

respect for the individual. If you give him [or her] a chance, the individual will do a lot more than you think he can. So, you give him [or her] the freedom. . . . Respect for the individual—not just employees . . . customers and the works. (p. 34)

Respect for the individual became an important value that I embraced throughout my career as a manager, and I showed little hesitation in accepting an offer to work for such a storied company that openly professed such personal sensitivity. By the time I arrived at the company, the employee population of company exceeded 300,000. On accepting the position, I initially thought that it would provide me with a solid foundation from which to work full time and simultaneously pursue an advanced degree in psychology. While this was true, what also unfolded was an ever-expanding managerial role that would last for more than a decade. The expanded scope of my duties presented personal challenges that far exceeded anything I had done before. At almost every turn, management had given me additional responsibilities including the managing of people and related programs resulting from large-scale mergers, acquisitions, and offshoring. Part of my extended responsibilities included developing a multicultural awareness as I managed people from different cultures in various cities that were located in Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Over the years, I had learned a great deal about managing people, but it was during my tenure in this latest position I found myself embracing the counseling techniques similar to what Maslow (1971) referred to as “the therapeutic attitude” (p. 50). By applying the principles of counseling, I discovered employees responding to me in unexpected ways. I realized the importance of methods similar to what Maslow (1971) described,

Counseling is not concerned with training or with molding or with teaching in the ordinary sense of telling people what to do and how to do it . . . It is a Taoistic uncovering and then helping . . . means the noninterfering, the letting be. (p. 51)

In other respects, my role as a manager moved toward what Venter (2012) believed to be as Maslow’s sixth level of motivational need, often referred to as self-transcendence, something which extends beyond the individual. Venter (2012) when defining self-transcendence as it applies to the workplace described it as a motivational need that has “a common purpose, a global perspective, and joint responsibility for the fate of the whole organization, identifying with a cause greater than themselves” (p. 64). Venter (2012) describes the organizational leader as one who self transcends stating:

They find meaning in life by connecting their life’s journey and happiness to the condition of others; not only those from the same culture directly around them, but from others all over the world, regardless of race, sex, country, or religion. . . . The self-transcended leader is the person who breaks free from organizational culture that focuses only on results at-all-cost and redefines their role and redirects their actions to include distinct social and environmental focus. (pp. 67, 69)

By emphasizing what Venter (2012) refers to as Maslow’s neglected sixth level of self-transcendence, “leadership programs and organizational leadership can positively enrich organization culture and leadership style and thereby the lives and society the people these companies serve” (p. 70). While I would never claim that I have ascended to the level of self-transcendence described by Venter, some of my greatest satisfactions in the workplace involved a sincere service to the others. I took great pleasure in helping and watching other people succeed.

Despite my managerial success in counseling knowledge workers, by 2003, the company’s core values and respect for the individual seemed to evaporate overnight. Tremendous shareholder pressure to maintain a leadership position in the computer hardware industry caused the board of directors to bring in leadership from outside the company for the very first time. Lacking the knowledge of the company’s culture in such a beloved institution, its core set of values, principles, and commitments became under assault. Large-scale mergers and acquisitions blurred lines of organizational responsibilities. It was during this time, an externally hired CEO oversaw the acquisition of a rival computer company that lead to the eventual layoffs of over 30,000 employees (Goldman, 2015). Outsourcing, which began in the 1990s, had also become a fundamental business strategy, eliminating thousands of local jobs, and moving them to Asia, Central and Latin America. According to Thomas Perkins, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, “I didn’t know there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is. It’s just astonishing” (Taylor, 2011).

Managing through the continuous wind of mergers and acquisitions meant I had to adjust my role as a manager in ways that extended beyond the shores of the United States. No longer could I walk down the hall and meet face-to-face with a knowledge worker, nor could I expect to understand all the cultural differences that were in play as I discussed that status of a project with an employee working remotely. I felt challenged by the cultural differences of employees from different countries around the world and by new employees who arrived through the process of acquisition. Regardless of where the knowledge worker lived, I found meaningful words by Maslow in eupsychian management that seem to reflect my own behavior as a manager throughout my career. Maslow said, “assume that everyone prefers to feel important, needed, useful, successful, proud, respected, rather than unimportant, interchangeable, anonymous, wasted, unused, expendable, [or] disrespected” (p. 25). After 15 years with the company, my role as a manager ended on August 31st, 2012, when I left the world of the knowledge work behind me to pursue other professional interests.