cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

The underpinning theoryHumanistic psychology has a number of key areas of focus:• the importance of subjective awareness as experienced by the individual;• the importance of taking responsibility for one’s situations – or at leastthe assumption that whatever the situation there will be an elementof choice in how you think, how you feel and how you act;• the significance of the person as a whole entity (a holistic approach)in the sense that as humans we are not just what we think or what wefeel, we are not just our behaviours. We exist within a social andcultural context.In juxtaposition with Freud’s view of the aim of therapy as moving theindividual from a state of neurotic anxiety to ordinary unhappiness,humanistic psychology has ‘unlimited aims… our prime aim is to enablethe person to get in touch with their real self’ (Rowan, 1983).Maslow and the hierarchy of needsMaslow did not follow the path of earlier psychologists by looking forsigns of ill health and disease. He researched what makes men andwomen creative, compassionate, spontaneous and able to live their livesto the full. He therefore studied the lives of men and women who hadexhibited these traits during their lives, and in so doing came to his theoryof motivation, calling it a hierarchy of needs. (See Figure 1.10.)Maslow believed that human beings have an inbuilt desire to grow anddevelop and move towards something he called self-actualization.However, in order to develop self-actualization an individual has to overcomeor satisfy a number of other needs first.One of Maslow’s insights was that until the lower level needs were metan individual would not progress or be interested in the needs higher upthe pyramid. He saw the first four levels of needs as ‘deficiency’ needs.By that he meant that it was the absence of satisfaction that led to theindividual being motivated to achieve something.Physiological needs are requirements such as food, water, shelter andsexual release. Clearly when they are lacking the individual will experiencephysiological symptoms such as hunger, thirst, discomfort and frustration.42