Abraham Maslow
Motivation and Personality
 In
the summer of '62, Abraham Maslow drove through the heavy fog along the
California's dangerous Big Sur coastal highway. An interesting sign caught his
eye and he pulled over to check it out. He had wandered upon the
world's first-ever personal growth facility, Esalen. Ironically, as he
arrived, staffers had just received copies of his most recent book,
Toward A Psychology of Being.
Given such lofty beginnings, it was inevitable that Abraham Maslow would turn
into the cult hero of the human potential society. With the central idea of the
'self-actualizing
person', his book,
Motivation and Personality showed a new ideal portayal of
humanity that delighted an entire generation.
But Maslow was not an overt revolutionary. His work as an academic psychologist
was largely a rebuttal to behaviorism, which decomposed indviduals into their
mechanistic parts, and Freudian psychoanalysis, which portrayed humanity as
uncontrollably giving into subconscious desires. Within the constraints of
the scientific method, Motivation and Personality tried
to portray people holistically, much like the way artists and poets try to
portray us. Instead of our being the merely aggregation of wants, needs, and
urges, Maslow saw human beings as an complete people with unlimited
opportunity for growth. His unwavering belief in the possibility of humanity
and societies, groups, and cultures we were capable of building influenced an
entire generation.
According to Maslow,Self-actualized individuals
have '...the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities,
potentialities and the like'. The self-actualized are successful as a
human, regardless and in addition to all external successes; not perfect,
mind you, but without any apparent major flaws. After Daniel Goleman
penned his bestselling book about
emotional intelligence, countless masses 'discovered' emotional
intelligence was a key for any great successes, but for the self-actualized,
this kind of intelligence is built-in.
Maslow researched seven contemporary and nine historical figures: Thomas
Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Abraham Lincoln, Jane
Addams, William James, Eleanor Roosevelt, Aldus Huxley and Spinoza.
He specified the nineteen characteristics of self-actualized
individuals, such as resistance to enculturation, clarity of perception, humble
and respectful, problem-centered, solitude seeking, ethical, and sense of
humor.
When he wrote Motivation and Personality,
Maslow assumed that a small portion of the population was
self-actualized, but even these very few could impact the whole of
the world.
Obviously,
Maslow's hierarchy of needs has been a cornerstone to understanding
workplace motivation, and employee
self-actualization is now a paramount concern in the business world.
He predicted the trend of personal growth
and interest displacing money as the chief motivator in people's
working lives.
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