Stephen Billing’s Blog

Theodore Taptiklis has written a very readable book called Unmanaging, in which he brings together the thinking of Patricia Benner, John Shotter, Ralph Stacey and David Boje.

He gives a critique of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, in which the relationship of the human person to the world is seen as a series of needs – things that it takes in from others. The needs are expressed in a hierarchy from survival to self-actualisation, and these needs correspond to stages of life maturity – the basic needs are those of infancy and the higher needs are those of the mature adult.

Taptiklis points out that these needs were seen as universal motivations which were held to be innate, and the individual could not therefore influence or take responsibility for them. And he sees this as a very plausible justification for selfishness that has been incorporated into a wide variety of human relations and economics theories.

Taptiklis poses some problems with this, saying that this process of categorising human needs allows humans to be regulated and administered by purely rational means, and leads to the acceptance of the possibility that all needs can be monetised.

According to Taptiklis, one of the most important implications of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is that it weakens the idea of human society. Each person is a walking bundle of needs, concerned about needs at one of the levels on the hierarchy depending on their maturity. The relationship of these individuals to others is about how those others can fulfill their needs.

Reading Taptiklis made me realise how individualistic Maslow’s hierarchy is. It really does not allow for the experience of humans as interdependent beings. And yet it is such a foundational part of all our management thinking about motivation. It is often taught as one of the basics of motivation, followed up by Herzberg’s theory about motivators and hygiene factors.

It is surely worth recognising that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs represents an individualist approach to being human rather than taking for granted that we are isolated bundles of needs walking around in bags of skin.

We make the mistake of "identifying with an isolated ego inside a bag of skin" (Eric Eisenberg). 

This attention-grabbing image echoes the idea of George Herbert Mead from 1934 in Mind, Self and Society that the mind is not some sort of essence or spirit that lives inside our heads or inside the brain. Our human minds, according to Mead, consist of the silent conversation we have with ourselves. This is a very social way of considering our sense of who we are and what it means to be a "self". In the same way that we have conversations with others, we have conversations with ourselves. 

A person’s mind then, is the singular of this conversational process. Our sense of who we are is thus formed through a social process of interaction with others. Covey in Seven Habits says that interdependence comes after independence but I do not agree with his idea of interdependence. I think we are interdependent human beings because we rely on others from the day we are born. And we rely on others in our organisational life. 

What we think it is to be human (independent or interdependent, mind as socially created processes of conversation with oneself, or as an ego inside a bag of skin) is very important for what we think we are doing when we try to change organisations. 

What do you think?