Edwin C. Nevis

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Edwin C. Nevis is president and founder of the Gestalt International Study Center and author of five books, including Organizational consulting: A Gestalt Approach and Intentional Revolutions: A Seven-Point Strategy for Transforming Organizations. He worked in the MIT Sloan School of Management for seventeen years and, while teaching organization psychology in a management program in Shanghai, China in 1981, he observed individuals there and found that their hierarchy of needs differed from Maslow's hierarchy of needs. From this, he formulated a Chinese hierarchy -- Nevis's hierarchy of needs -- showing the cultural relativity of the Maslow framework based on American culture and suggesting different need hierarchies for different cultures classified according to an individualism-collectivism dimension and an ego-social dimension.