Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow was born in New York in 1908. He was the eldest of seven children born to his parents, who themselves were uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents hoping for the best for their children in the new world pushed him hard for academic success. He wanted to develop a psychology that would deal with the best and highest potentials in human nature. Maslow spent much of his career at Brandeis University, where he provided crucial leadership for the fledgling humanistic movement. He argued that psychology should take a greater interest in the nature of the healthy personality, instead of dwelling on the disorders. “To oversimplify the matter somewhat,” he said, “it is as if Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out the healthy half” (Maslow, 1968, p.5). Maslow’s key contributions were his analysis of how motives are organized hierarchically and his description of the healthy personality. He emphasized belongingness, love, affection respect for other and building self-respect. Maslow developed the Hierarchy of Needs model in 1940-1950’s, which remains valid for understanding human motivation, management training and personal development. Maslow’s ideas surrounding the Hierarchy of Needs concerning the responsibility of employers to provide a workplace environment that encourages and enables employees to fulfill their own unique potential are