I had the same problem but I solved in other way (becouse at right click on project folder no Maven tab apears only if I do that on pom.xml I can see a Maven tab):
So I tink that you get that error because the IDE (Eclipse) didn`t import the dependecies from Maven. Since you are using Spring framework and you probably have STS allready installed right-click on project folder Spring Tools -> Update Maven Dependecies.
I`m using Eclipse JUNO m2eclipse 1.3.0 Spring IDEE 3.1