Eupsychian management and the millennium

The article introduces the Utopian vision of managing people at work described in Abraham Maslow’s book Eupsychian Management. This essentially foresees a time when organizations are managed by self‐actualising people along lines which would encourage the self‐actualisation of people from all levels of the organization. Maslow’s vision was that this would lead to really effective organizations and a much improved society. The article considers how far such movements as quality of working life, TQM, empowerment and autonomous working groups have moved us towards this sort of management practice. There are definite moves in this direction but considerable constraints on making the practice universal, even though there is growing empirical evidence that positive human resource practices lead to improved efficiency and effectiveness.