Fredrick Taylor and Abraham Maslow Term Paper

He left it as saying that humans have five types of needs. All his sayings come from his book called Motivation and Personality that was released in 1943. The lowest level of needs is the physiological needs and these come from the human body and these are like air, warmth, food, sleep, stimulations and activity. On top of these needs are the security or safety needs like being away from threats and these needs are the strongest among children as they feel the greatest need to be safe. Then are the social needs like the love of family and friends. The next level of needs is those for ego or self-esteem. These demand that we have self-respect and get respect from others. The highest level of needs is those for self-actualization or fulfillment. These needs are prominent among people who have achieved all other requirements and have a healthy personality. These reflect in the forms of 'truth, goodness, beauty, unity, transcendence, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, justice, order and simplicity'. (Maslow's Hierarchy of needs: Deeper Mind) All the levels of need were placed by him on top of each other like a pyramid, starting from the first level up to the fifth level. There is no attempt here to judge a category of persons as having different mentality than another group. In short, he believed that all humans were born equal.

The hierarchy of needs and the specific needs within each were defined by him. In the first instance it was."..it seems impossible as well as useless to make any list of fundamental physiological needs, for they can come to almost any number one might wish, depending on the degree of specificity of description." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic) Then came the second stage and the definition was "If the physiological needs are relatively well gratified, there then emerges a new set of needs, which we may categorize roughly as the safety needs, security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, anxiety, and chaos; need for structure, order, law, and limits; strength in the protector; and so on." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic)

It is clear that the third set was thought to be superior over the first two for he wrote "If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new center. The love needs involve giving and receiving affection. When they are unsatisfied, a person will feel keenly the absence of friends, mate, or children." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic) The fourth level was thought by him to come only when the first three were satisfied for he wrote "All people in our society with a few pathological exceptions have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, usually high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. These needs may therefore be classified into two subsidiary sets. These are, first, the desire for strength, achievement, adequacy, mastery and competence, confidence in the face of the world, and independence and freedom. Second, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige defining it as respect or esteem from other people, status, fame and glory, dominance, recognition, attention, importance, dignity, or appreciation." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic)

The reasons for the fourth level of needs are also clearly explained by him as being from "Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability, and adequacy, of being useful and necessary in the world. But thwarting of these needs produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness, and of helplessness." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic) The other side of the requirement of these needs is obvious and these are stated by him as "The most stable and therefore most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic) Then Maslow reaches to the highest level of needs in human beings and he states "Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he or she, individually, is fitted for. Musicians must make music, artists must paint, and poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What humans can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic)

Now let us get back to the industry that we are concerned with, telecommunications electronics.There are expected growths in this industry during the period up to 2012, at 7% but this growth is lower than the general growth of less than 16% that is expected. (Telecommunications) The present salaries in the industry are also higher than the average in all industries. Thus there does not seem to be any great problem immediately in dealing with the workers, except that their development needs as clearly theorized by Abraham Maslow are not likely to be satisfied. In today's world, any tactics used by Taylor will leave very few workers for the job. The figures that we are talking about have been given by the government and are not likely to be wrong. The changes are coming in a different way and that is through the users becoming more and more independent. (How to get Ahead in the Communications Game)

In the United States, there are now 238 million email addresses as against only 231 million telephone lines. This has led to voice communications becoming just 46% of all communications with instant messaging becoming 24%, email as 20% and faxes as 10%. (How to get Ahead in the Communications Game) This shows that there will clearly be changes in the type of workers that are required, but the changes are happening very fast and are almost unpredictable. This means that one has to deal with the situation as it comes. At the same time, the entire industry is shifting to a position where they would all like to provide some social services as individuals are slowly becoming more and more concerned with social requirements. One of the areas where the industries are contributing is education. (Cable in the classroom) None of this is really much of a help in managing today's workers.

Summary:

As one an see that the two doyens of management whose theories that we have discussed belong to another era, and at least the theories of Frederick Taylor are clearly out of date and would not help any organization. So far as the theories of Abraham Maslow are concerned, they would help us to understand how the worker thinks, but it is not a general theory for only workers. It is directed to the general feelings of all humans, and the only individuals that managers are supposed to deal with and put on the proper path are the workers. This is becoming increasingly difficult as the differences are becoming less and less between good workers or technicians and prospective owners. That is what is happening in the telecommunication industry. For the other workers, they are only interested in the job for the money and not much can be expected out of them.

Conclusion and Recommendation:

What we are now going through is another period of change. A lot of jobs are slowly becoming redundant and all individuals are starting to help themselves. Production in factories is becoming highly automatic and thus the number of workers required is falling sharply. There are very few requirements for workers - what we require more are service personnel and that is the business growing at a very rapid speed. The requirements for the service industry is not what they can produce, but how happy they can keep the clients as if the clients are unhappy, they always have the choice to go to another supplier. It is not like the situation in the old age when Model T. Ford sold for a number of years, or even Volkswagen. We are talking about an era of rapid changes, and in that the role of the manager has also changed. They cannot control the staff under them but have to induce them to work. They have to pick up the good producers and convince them to stay on so that the organization can perform well. The requirement is not only financial or other material incentives, but also their mental satisfaction. In that the theories of Abraham Maslow are useful.

Works Cited

Abraham H. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" Retrieved at http://www.accel-team.com/human_relations/hrels_02_maslow.html. Accessed 14 August, 2005

Abraham Maslow: 1908-1970" Retrieved at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhmasl.html. Accessed 14 August, 2005

Abraham Maslow" Retrieved at http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Maslow.htm. Accessed 14 August, 2005

Biography: Abraham Maslow" Retrieved at http://www.dushkin.com/connectext/psy/ch11/bio11e.mhtml. Accessed 14 August, 2005

Cable in the classroom" Retrieved at http://www.timewarnercable.com/centralny/community/cableintheclassroom/default.html. Accessed 14 August, 2005

Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management" Retrieved….....