|
Abraham Maslow's
"Hierarchy of Needs" is a
simple, effective and practical way to understand normal
human behavior. It is a management classic that many of us vaguely
recall it from some long-ago study. This article summarizes the
original 1943 paper, "A
Theory of Human Motivation."
The Five Basic Needs
Maslow suggested
five categories of
basic needs that are
common to all human beings. These categories
apply across all cultures, activities, professions and social
positions. They are:
Physiological Needs
The physiological needs are those things
that keep the body alive and reasonably healthy. Examples are food,
clothing and shelter. This is the most basic need of any organism
and is at the bottom of the hierarchy as shown in the figure.
Safety
People need to feel
physically safe in
their environment. In millennia past this meant safe from prowling
saber tooth tigers. Today it may mean safety from assault or safety
from harmful equipment and harmful chemicals.
Social Needs
Maslow originally used the term "Love
Needs" but his description better fits the word "Social". This need
involves connections with other people and includes family, group
belongingness and friendship as well as romance.
All normal people
want a place in a group or society, even if they sometimes deny it.
Esteem Needs
With a few pathological exceptions,
people need a realistic sense of self esteem and esteem from others.
Self Esteem includes honest achievement, feeling adequate to face
the world, confidence , independence and freedom. Esteem from others
involves reputation, respect, attention and recognition.
Self Fulfillment (Self-Actualization)
Needs
Self-Actualization is the most
misunderstood of Maslow's categories because of an unfortunate word
choice. The ancient Greeks would have called it
"fulfilling your
destiny."
The Hierarchy
The needs are not equal in their
motivational power at any given time. They have a hierarchy of
"prepotency." This means that lower needs in the hierarchy must be
substantially gratified before higher needs become motivators.
People who are malnourished, hungry and cold are hardly interested
in approval or recognition--they just want food and warmth and they
will take serious personal risks to obtain it.
Once the physiological needs are
substantially satisfied, people are concerned about safety. They
need to feel freedom from violence, accidents or other physical
harm. Without this feeling, they have little concern for friendship,
recognition or destiny.
When people feel reasonably safe and
have the physiological means to sustain life, social needs come into
play and so on until self-fulfillment becomes the prime mover for
behavior.
The Role of Fear
In the eighth of
Edwards Deming's Fourteen Points, he urged managers to
"Drive fear out of the workplace"
for a very practical reason:
Fear only motivates
to minimal compliance.
Once minimal demands are met, the fear
is removed and motivation ceases. Fear does not get the best
performance from people and often brings out unintended and
undesirable behaviors.
Physiological and safety needs are
largely met in modern societies. Their power to directly motivate
mostly ended with labor unions, the welfare state and the liberation of
Auschwitz. To some extent, irrational fear can still motivate. For
example, fear of losing a job stems from irrational fears of ensuing
starvation. such fears, however, are secondary.
The lower needs
(physiological and safety) motivate entirely through fear.
For some people and to some extent, social and esteem needs are
fear-based. Therefore, these lower needs are incompatible with Lean
and with high performance. Besides, they never did work very well.
What About Lean?
Effective Lean operations leverage these
higher motivators and integrate them with appropriate technologies.
The concepts of Socio-Technical
Systems play a large role in this. More....
|
Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of
Needs
|
Maslow on Self-Actualization
"A musician must make
music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be
ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be."
or
"Growth is, in itself, a
rewarding and exciting process, e.g., the fulfilling of yearnings
and ambitions, like that of being a good doctor; the acquisition of
admired skills, like playing the violin or being a good carpenter;
the steady increase of understanding about people or about the
universe, or about oneself; the development of creativeness in
whatever field, or, most important, simply the ambition to be a good
human being."
|
|
 Abraham
Maslow (1908-1970)
A psychologist, Maslow studied
what he called exemplary peoples rather than the mentally
ill or neurotic. He wrote that "the study of crippled,
stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a
cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy." Maslow was
among the first "humanist psychologists" who focused on
normal, healthy ways of coping with life.
Maslow first published his
theory in the 1940s, and it became a widely accepted notion
in the fields of psychology and anthropology. This original
article,
A
Theory of Human Motivation , is available on the internet. He was a
professor at Brandeis University. His major texts included
Motivation and Personality (1954) and Toward a
Psychology of Being (1962). |
Authors: Quarterman Lee in collaboration
with August Tetzlaff, JAN 2010
|
