Clayton P. Alderfer (1940–2015)

Clayton Paul Alderfer was born on September 1, 1940 to Ruth and Paul Alderfer in Bethlehem Pennsylvania. While at Bethlehem High School he met Charleen Frankenfield who would become his wife. Alderfer went to Yale College in 1958 and upon graduation (and marriage) in he enrolled in the new doctoral programme in Administrative Sciences (organisational behaviour) at Yale. His primary doctoral advisor was Chris Argyris and in he became the first person to earn a doctorate from this programme.

After two years at Cornell, Alderfer returned to Yale to join the Administrative Sciences Department. Over the next fifteen years together with a host of other faculty and students Alderfer helped build a renowned doctoral programme in organisational behaviour. In he became the first Director of Professional Studies for the newly created School of Organization and Management, guiding it through the challenges and opportunities that come with building an innovative masters level programme from the ground up. Within a decade the Yale School of Organization and Management was respected for graduating students who knew how to work with others in sophisticated and effective ways.

In Alderfer moved to the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers following the brutal destruction of the doctoral programme in organisational behaviour at Yale and the School of Management's decision to become a more traditional business school. At GSAPP Alderfer shepherded the doctoral programme in organisational psychology until his retirement in 2008.

Alderfer was a master teacher and scholar. Generations of students can trace their intellectual roots to his courses on group dynamics and organisational diagnosis, or his advisory role on a dissertation or research project. Early in his career Alderfer conceptually reformulated Maslow's need hierarchy theory, subjecting the new theoretical framework to empirical testing. His ERG theory (existence, relatedness, and growth) is still t