Abstract
Eupsychian management was Abraham Maslow’s term for workplaces of creativity, synergy, and continuous learning. His ideas were crystalized while visiting Non-Linear Systems, founded by Andrew Kay. Eupsychian management, a phrase congruent yet distinct from utopian concepts, specifically referred to environments designed for improving the self-fulfillment and psychological health of all its members. Maslow astutely observed that the characteristics of such environments were its general atmosphere for creative pursuit rather than a specific policy or practice. With retrospective hindsight, Maslow’s managerial ideas, once visionary in nature, have been largely integrated into mainstream management theory and practice. However, his desire for less competitive, controlling, and hierarchical workplaces has been frustrated by ever-increasing global competition, fragmentation, and pressure for cost-efficiencies. The lasting impact of Eupsychian ideals may lie in its humanistic clarity. Human beings long for meaning, purpose, and contribution to a more just and regenerative world. The workplace cannot succeed as an island of psychological health separate from broader efforts to bring forth social justice and environmental renewal.
By his own admission, Abraham Maslow never had exposure to industrial workplaces or management psychology when he visited Non-Linear Systems in 1962, maker of digital instruments. He barely had familiarity with the relatively new field of social psychology, but he grasped intuitively the workplace as fertile ground for his cherished ideals of human growth and potential. What if it could be shown that psychologically healthy work environments, led by a cadre of self-actualizing leaders, could produce greater harmony among workers and greater efficiency in the production of goods and services? This would be the metaphoric gold at the end of the rainbow for those seeking utopian-like environments that contrasted with a world preoccupied with control, hierarchy, and money. The workplace could be experimental grounds for researching the objective powers of synergy rather than living with norms of separation and conflict. “It looks to me . . . ,” wrote Maslow, “as if any Utopia, or Eupsychia (which I think is a better name), must have . . . high synergy institutions” (Maslow, 1971/1976, p. 200).
Eupsychian was an alternative phrase for utopian and a term congruent with all Utopian thinkers, the good society. Merging the Greek preface eu (meaning good) with psyche, referencing the totality of being fully human, Eupsychian better captured Maslow’s vision of a society whose aim was the real possibility of fostering human flourishing.
I’ve coined the word Eupsychia and defined it as the culture that would be generated by 1,000 self-actualizing people on some sheltered island where they would not be interfered with. Then, by contrast with the classical Utopian and Dystopian dreams of fantasies, the questions become quite real; e.g. how good a society does human nature permit? How good a human nature does society permit? (Maslow, 1965, p. xi)
For Maslow, Eupsychia began as a thought experiment about human possibilities but developed into an operational mechanism for studying self-actualizing environments, forerunners of the good society. “I have already pointed out,” Maslow wrote in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, published 6 years after the publication of Euspsychian Management, “that one usable operational meaning of the ‘good society’ is the degree to which it offers all its members the basic need satisfactions and the possibilities of self-actualization and human fulfillment” (Maslow, 1971/1976, p. 136).
During his visit to Non-Linear Systems, a number of insights came together for him. Founded by Andrew Kay, a charismatic inventor and businessman, Non-Linear Systems embraced an innovative management approach that prioritized its workers’ needs. Time clocks were absent, salespeople were not burdened with detailed expense reports, assembly line workers earned 25% above minimum wage, and self-governing teams were charged with production oversight (Chawkins, 2014). For Kay, learning and human growth was everything, and Maslow found in him kindred spirit whose workplace practices validated Maslow’s own deep beliefs about human potential.
What is remarkable is that Maslow, ever the keen observer, understood that the environment Kay created was not reducible to any one innovation. Rather than focus on specific interventions, he was more taken with an atmosphere and climate that continuously valued learning and discovery. Today, we would call this an emergent quality, a social field that is capable of reproducing a generative environment promoting creativity and interpersonal regard.
I would like to say also that this general approach seems to be a much better, a more fruitful way to talk about “climate.” I have tried to pin down the Nonlinear Systems organizational setup and what was the cause of all the good effect there. All I can say is that the whole place was a climate of creative atmosphere. I couldn’t pick one main cause as over against another. There was freedom of a general kind, atmospheric, holistic, global, rather than a little thing that you did on Tuesday—one particular, separable thing. The right climate, the best climate for enhancing creativeness would be a Utopia, or Eupsychia, as I prefer to call it, a society which was specifically designed for improving the self-fulfillment and psychological health of all people. (Maslow, 1971/1976, p.75)
To sum up, Maslow was fascinated with utopian ideas of human potential but was equally intrigued by instances in which theory and practice converged. Eupsychian management was a more apt term than utopian for describing the general conditions from which well-being and happiness could actually flourish. There would be ups and downs, but like an individual, a business could thrive from values that fostered originality and resiliency. In fact, by the time of Eupsychian Management’s publication, Non-Linear Systems was experiencing harder times. Maslow reiterated that his ideas were not dependent on a single case example and that his principles were most suited for good conditions, not stormier times when regressive forces were triggered.
Retrospective
With nearly 60 years of hindsight, there is much Maslow got right about the higher aims of good management and much he could not foresee. Many of Maslow’s theoretical instincts about management and healthy workplaces are now accepted practices, taught to organizational coaches and administered through a myriad managerial leadership programs. More problematic, the competitive pressures in the global marketplace to be ever more cost-efficient, controlling, and hierarchical have only intensified. Maslow’s analogy that businesses, like individuals, could navigate better and worse periods of weather is now better compared with the realities of climate change. Rather than periodic rain, storms, and seasonal fluctuations that might affect a limited area, climate change is about longer term effects and historical neglect that span the planet. These longer term trends are not ameliorated by simply having a better place to work. Andrew Kay and his businesses served as a case example, even if they were not meant to be essential to Maslow’s theories.
During the decades following Maslow’s visit, cost pressures increased, and the viability of Kay’s enterprises were threatened, battered by larger companies and cuts in the aerospace industry. Pivoting from digital instruments to computers, Kay’s invention of the Kaypro in 1982, a pioneering compact unit for personal computing, was a lifeline, but short lived. By the early 1990s, the company failed when (among other reasons) Kay refused to offshore his manufacturing unit to cheaper facilities overseas (Chawkins, 2014). His commitment to an island of sanity and allegiance to workers were challenged and overcome by global competitive pressures he could not control.
Maslow’s pursuit of Eupsychian principles can best be understood in the context of a world he knew might veer closer to dystopian fantasies. He warned that the systematic frustration of basic needs for survival and higher needs for meaning and purpose would result in personal and collective neurosis. He suggested that it was a researchable question to inquire into the effects of social climates that were not hospitable to human-centered values.
“What are the effects of living in a dishonest world,” he wrote, “an evil world, an ugly world, a split, disintegrated world, a dead, static world of clichés and stereotypes, an incomplete, unfinished world, a world without order or justice, an unnecessarily complicated world, oversimplified, overabstract world, a effortful world, a humorless world, a world without privacy or independence?” (Maslow, 1971/1976, p. 136)
The desire to build a better world from smaller islands of healthier settings now must be complemented by the need for larger scale collective action, yet still guided by the principles of human flourishing.
What Is In a Name? The Spirit That Resides When Truly Invited
There were clearly logical reasons for Maslow’s naming of self-actualizing principles as central to an approach called Eupsychian. I have highlighted some of those reasons, suggesting that a utopian ideal was tempered by Maslow’s desire to show instances of actual materialization. But I believe that there is an additional value wrapped around his choice of term, a hidden resonance with a related word. And that word is eudaimonia.
Eudaimonia is a word with ancient roots, still used today for psychological research on happiness and well-being with striking similarities to Maslow’s self-actualization principles. Eudaimonia, like the principles of self-actualization, concerns not just happiness but the best possible conditions for being human. Clearly, embedded in the phrase Eupsychian management was a desire for environments to cultivate eudaimonia, a society based on ethical rather than competitive motives. The key linguistic difference, of course, is in the substitution of psychia for daimonia in the second part of the compound phrase. Both terms refer to the totality of being human, but daimonia adds a further dimension. What were the ancients pointing to by their use of daimonia?
There are many interpretations of what the term eudaimonia might have meant to people like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but it is the concept of the daimon that fascinates me. A daimon was a particular kind of spirit, a paradoxical mix of human and divine qualities. Not the demon of Catholic lore, but rather a quixotic guiding spirit that influenced human destiny, dividing one path from another. Ignore the guiding spirit and you may find yourself empty of purpose. Listen to the guiding spirit and you may find yourself in all kinds of creative and sometimes problematic mischief. There was an impersonal quality to the daimon’s role in human affairs. Pay attention to what really matters, the daimon demanded, but ultimately do as you wish and pay later for the consequences.
Eudaimonia, the spirit of goodness, resided in humans who cultivated virtues that were both personal and civic. The question of being home to such a daimon was not so much about doing and achieving but being and relating. We become vessels of good spirits when we are self-aware and capable of thinking of others, not just about our own needs and desires. This may seem initially abstract, but it holds a clear contrast with hedonic pursuits, relating to immediate pleasures and short-term gains.
Who must we be, moment to moment, and over time, as a person and a society to retain the spirit of the good? This naturally suggests virtues like courage and temperance, as well as a genuine desire to pursue justice and wisdom. But it is not simply a checklist of items. Like Maslow’s insight about Andrew Kay’s business climate, there is not one or two things that this spirit can be reduced to, something you do on Tuesday—one particular separable thing. Rather, there is a holistic response and a deep inquiry into what is needed in the historical moment.
To pursue a Eupsychian climate today, we cannot focus solely on human betterment and superior forms of supervision. We must also address the consequences of an unjust society and the destructive influences on the natural world. Similarly, we cannot narrowly seek to better interpersonal relationships that promote productivity without also seeking to identify the kinds of productivity in goods and services that best serve human and environmental flourishing. In other words, the emphasis on islands of sanity must be complementary to larger scale social interventions that cut across multiple social sectors including business, education, health, and the arts.
I say this not from a perspective of the utopian idealist but as a pragmatist. No Spirit of Well-Being will visit, let alone reside, in a society that ignores racial injustice, vast economic disparities, and willful degradation of the environment. Eupsychian management today is a call for how everyone can contribute to a more just and regenerative world. For the spirit of well-being is not impressed by utopian grand schemes but can be drawn to us by the sincerity, perseverance, and courage of our actions.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biography