The following excerpt taken from: Psychology - The Search for Understanding
by Janet A. Simons, Donald B. Irwin and Beverly A. Drinnien
West Publishing Company, New York, 1987
Abraham Maslow developed a theory of personality that has influenced a number of different fields, including education. This wide influence is due in part to the high level of practicality of Maslow's theory. This theory accurately describes many realities of personal experiences. Many people find they can understand what Maslow says. They can recognize some features of their experience or behavior which is true and identifiable but which they have never put into words.
Maslow is a humanistic psychologist. Humanists do not believe that human beings are pushed and pulled by mechanical forces, either of stimuli and reinforcements (behaviorism) or of unconscious instinctual impulses (psychoanalysis). Humanists focus upon potentials. They believe that humans strive for an upper level of capabilities. Humans seek the frontiers of creativity, the highest reaches of consciousness and wisdom. This has been labeled "fully functioning person", "healthy personality", or as Maslow calls this level, "self-actualizing person."
Maslow has set up a hierarchic theory of needs. All of his basic needs are instinctoid, equivalent of instincts in animals. Humans start with a very weak disposition that is then fashioned fully as the person grows. If the environment is right, people will grow straight and beautiful, actualizing the potentials they have inherited. If the environment is not "right" (and mostly it is not) they will not grow tall and straight and beautiful.
Maslow has set up a hierarchy of five levels of basic needs. Beyond these needs, higher levels of needs exist. These include needs for understanding, esthetic appreciation and purely spiritual needs. In the levels of the five basic needs, the person does not feel the second need until the demands of the first have been satisfied, nor the third until the second has been satisfied, and so on. Maslow's basic needs are as follows:
Physiological Needs
These are biological needs. They consist of needs for oxygen, food, water, and a relatively constant body temperature. They are the strongest needs because if a person were deprived of all needs, the physiological ones would come first in the person's search for satisfaction.
Safety Needs
When all physiological needs are satisfied and are no longer controlling thoughts and behaviors, the needs for security can become active. Adults have little awareness of their security needs except in times of emergency or periods of disorganization in the social structure (such as widespread rioting). Children often display the signs of insecurity and the need to be safe.
Needs of Love, Affection and Belongingness
When the needs for safety and for physiological well-being are satisfied, the next class of needs for love, affection and belongingness can emerge.
Maslow states that people seek to overcome feelings of loneliness and alienation. This involves both giving and receiving love, affection and the sense of belonging.
Needs for Esteem
When the first three classes of needs are satisfied, the needs for esteem can become dominant. These involve needs for both self-esteem and for the esteem a person gets from others. Humans have a need for a stable, firmly based, high level of self-respect, and respect from others. When these needs are satisfied, the person feels self-confident and valuable as a person in the world. When these needs are frustrated, the person feels inferior, weak, helpless and worthless.
Needs for Self-Actualization
When all of the foregoing needs are satisfied, then and only then are the needs for self-actualization activated. Maslow describes self-actualization as a person's need to be and do that which the person was "born to do." "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write." These needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness. The person feels on edge, tense, lacking something, in short, restless. If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem, it is very easy to know what the person is restless about. It is not always clear what a person wants when there is a need for self-actualization.
The hierarchic theory is often represented as a pyramid, with the larger, lower levels representing the lower needs, and the upper point representing the need for self-actualization. Maslow believes that the only reason that people would not move well in direction of self-actualization is because of hindrances placed in their way by society. He states that education is one of these hindrances. He recommends ways education can switch from its usual person-stunting tactics to person-growing approaches. Maslow states that educators should respond to the potential an individual has for growing into a self-actualizing person of his/her own kind. Ten points that educators should address are listed:
- We should teach people to be authentic, to be aware of their inner selves and to hear their inner-feeling voices.
- We should teach people to transcend their cultural conditioning and become world citizens.
- We should help people discover their vocation in life, their calling, fate or destiny. This is especially focused on finding the right career and the right mate.
- We should teach people that life is precious, that there is joy to be experienced in life, and if people are open to seeing the good and joyous in all kinds of situations, it makes life worth living.
We must accept the person as he or she is and help the person learn their
- inner nature. From real knowledge of aptitudes and limitations we can know what to build upon, what potentials are really there.
- We must see that the person's basic needs are satisfied. This includes safety, belongingness, and esteem needs.
- We should refreshen consciousness, teaching the person to appreciate beauty and the other good things in nature and in living.
- We should teach people that controls are good, and complete abandon is bad. It takes control to improve the quality of life in all areas.
- We should teach people to transcend the trifling problems and grapple with the serious problems in life. These include the problems of injustice, of pain, suffering, and death.
We must teach people to be good choosers. They must be given practice in making good choices.
McClelland's Theory of Needs [from ]
In his acquired-needs theory, David McClelland proposed that an individual's specific needs are acquired over time and are shaped by one's life experiences. Most of these needs can be classed as either achievement, affiliation, or power. A person's motivation and effectiveness in certain job functions are influenced by these three needs. McClelland's theory sometimes is referred to as the three need theory or as the learned needs theory.
Achievement
People with a high need for achievement (nAch) seek to excel and thus tend to avoid both low-risk and high-risk situations. Achievers avoid low-risk situations because the easily attained success is not a genuine achievement. In high-risk projects, achievers see the outcome as one of chance rather than one's own effort. High nAch individuals prefer work that has a moderate probability of success, ideally a 50% chance. Achievers need regular feedback in order to monitor the progress of their acheivements. They prefer either to work alone or with other high achievers.
Affiliation
Those with a high need for affiliation (nAff) need harmonious relationships with other people and need to feel accepted by other people. They tend to conform to the norms of their work group. High nAff individuals prefer work that provides significant personal interaction. They perform well in customer service and client interaction situations.
Power
A person's need for power (nPow) can be one of two types - personal and institutional. Those who need personal power want to direct others, and this need often is percieved as undesirable. Persons who need institutional power (also known as social power) want to organize the efforts of others to further the goals of the organization. Managers with a high need for institutional power tend to be more effective than those with a high need for personal power.
Thematic Apperception Test
McClelland used the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) as a tool to measure the individual needs of different people. The TAT is a test of imagination that presents the subject with a series of ambiguous pictures, and the subject is asked to develop a spontaneous story for each picture. The assumption is that the subject will project his or her own needs into the story.
Psychologists have developed fairly reliable scoring techniques for the Thematic Apperception Test. The test determines the individual's score for each of the needs of achievement, affiliation, and power. This score can be used to suggest the types of jobs for which the person might be well suited.
Implications for Management
People with different needs are motivated differently.
- High need for achievement - High achievers should be given challenging projects with reachable goals. They should be provided frequent feedback. While money is not an important motivator, it is an effective form of feedback.
- High need for affiliation - Employees with a high affiliation need perform best in a cooperative environment.
- High need for power - Management should provide power seekers the opportunity to manage others.
Note that McClelland's theory allows for the shaping of a person's needs; training programs can be used to modify one's need profile.
Neck, C.P. & Moorhead, G. (1992). Jury Deliberations in the Trial of U.S. v. John DeLorean: A Case Analysis of Groupthink
Avoidance and an Enhanced Framework. Human Relations 45(10), 1077
Abstract:
A recent study used the groupthink framework of Janis (1983) to analyze the jury deliberations in the trial of US versus John DeLorean. Groupthink is a way of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, such as a jury. This way of thinking causes a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures. Analysis of the DeLorean case based on extensive interviews with 11 of the 12 jurors reveals that while a majority of groupthink antecedent conditions existed within the group of jury members, the symptoms and decision-defects of groupthink did not occur. This resulted in a decision of high quality. Groupthink was avoided because of the establishment of methodical decision-making procedures at the outset of the group meeting. Thus, training sessions should emphasize the
establishment of procedures to depersonalize group debate, to ensure discussion of alternative solutions, and to ensure a thorough information search.
Chris P. Neck(1,2) and Gregory Moorhead(1)
This paper utilizes the groupthink framework (Janis, 1983) to analyze the jury deliberations in the trial of U.S. v. John DeLorean. Based on this analysis, an enhanced groupthink framework is presented that attempts to highlight a major factor that accounts for why defective decision-making does not occur in situations in which groupthink antecedent conditions are present--that is, the presence of methodical decision-making procedures.
INTRODUCTION
In 1972, Irving Janis coined the term "groupthink" as "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group...members' striving for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action ...a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures" (1972, p.
9). Support for the occurrence of this phenomenon was based on his historical case analysis of the decision-making activities of governmental policy-making groups that resulted in either major "fiascoes" or outstanding successes.
Since the origination of groupthink, various case studies have appeared in the literature that involve the retrospective
applications of actual decision-making situations to Janis's (1983) groupthink framework. More specifically, groupthink has
been used to explain highly consequential decision-making settings such as the Iran Hostage Rescue Mission (Smith, 1984), the Kent State Gymnasium controversy (Hensley & Griffin, 1986), and the Space Shuttle Challenger launch (Moorhead, Ference, & Neck, 1991). Although these analyses provide support for the occurrence of the groupthink phenomenon, this case study approach to the groupthink research still falls short of completely addressing this decision-making process, due to one glaring omission, All of these studies that followed Janis' work were situations where the decision-making group succumbed to the groupthink pressures and thus the quality of the decision was poor. Consequently, the groupthink literature is missing case
studies that depict decision successes--situations in which the group decision-making conditions were such that groupthink
should have occurred but did not--thus resulting in high quality decisions, Surely, we can learn as much, if not more, about
decision-making by examining decision-making successes, rather than just studying decision-making failures, In fact, this
omission was partly committed by Janis (1983) as only two of the eight policy-making groups that he analyzed depicted a
decision of high quality. A clearer understanding of groupthink could be facilitated by a case study that examines situations in
which decision-making groups are susceptible to groupthink and describes the factors that seem to account for why defective
decision making does not occur. Considering that most of the important and highly consequential decisions affecting
organizations today are made in groups, a better understanding of the groupthink phenomenon and how to prevent it could be
quite beneficial.
The purpose of this paper is to enhance the literature by providing a modern and business-oriented case analysis of a highly
consequential group decision-making situation--the jury deliberations for the drug trafficking case of the U.S. v. John Delorean
--in which the conditions for groupthink were prevalent, yet the phenomenon was avoided resulting in a decision of high quality.
The decision confronting the jury in this case was whether or not John Delorean was entrapped into committing the drug related conspiracy. Due to the work of Steven Brill (1989) in which he interviewed many of the actual jurors in this trial, information concerning the jury deliberations is available for analysis as a group decision possibly susceptible to groupthink. These interviews were quite extensive in that 11 of the 12 jurors (and three of four alternates) were interviewed, most more than once, Furthermore, there was also one 3-hour group interview session involving eight jurors (Brill, 1989).
Before delving into the details of this jury's decision-making processes, a brief overview of Janis's (1983) framework is
provided. Then, the jury deliberations of the Delorean case are analyzed in terms of the groupthink phenomena. Finally, an
enhanced groupthink framework based on the evidence obtained from our case study will be presented and discussed,
WHAT IS GROUPTHINK?
The major thrust of Janis' (1983) model (see Fig. 1) is that the presence of a number of specific antecedent conditions increases
the probability that the group will elicit symptoms representative of groupthink. Additionally, these symptoms will lead to
observable defects in the group's decision-making processes that may result in poor quality decisions (Moorhead & Montanari,
1986).
ANTECEDENT CONDITIONS
According to Janis (1983), antecedent conditions are the observable causes of groupthink. In other words, they are the
conditions "that produce, elicit, or facilitate the occurrence of the syndrome" (p. 176). The primary antecedent condition
necessary for groupthink is a highly cohesive group. As Janis (1983) states:
...Only when a group of policy-makers is moderately or highly cohesive can we expect the groupthink syndrome to emerge as
the members are working collectively on one or another of their important policy decisions (p. 176).
Group cohesiveness is often defined as "the result of all the forces acting on the members to remain in the group" (Festinger,
1954). Similarly, Janis (1983) argues that "the more amiability and esprit de corps among the members of an in-group of
policy-makers, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink..." (p. 245).
However, it is important to note that cohesiveness is a necessary but insufficient condition for groupthink to pervade a
decision-making group. Janis postulated a number of secondary conditions necessary for groupthink to occur. Some of these
secondary conditions relate to the structural or administrative faults of the organization. These include (1) insulation of the