Maslow, the motivator

How to motivate people is one of the most common concerns of leaders. Motivation is essentially motive for action. The moment we think of the term motivation, the first name comes to our mind is Maslow. It is so synonymous with the motivational hierarchy that he popularised. Today’s column attempts to share myriad facets of Maslow.

A different April first

Interestingly, yesterday was his birthday. Abraham Harold Maslow was born 1 April 1908 in Brooklyn, New York.

He was the first of seven children born to his parents, who themselves were uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents, hoping for the best for their children in the new world, pushed him hard for academic success. Not surprisingly, he became very lonely as a boy, and found his refuge in books.

He received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology, all from the University of Wisconsin. A year after graduation, he returned to New York to work with E. L. Thorndike at Columbia, where Maslow became interested in research on human sexuality.

He began teaching full time at Brooklyn College. During this period of his life, he came into contact with the many European intellectuals that were immigrating to the US, and Brooklyn in particular, at that time – people like Adler, Fromm, Horney, as well as several Gestalt and Freudian psychologists.

Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at Brandeis from 1951 to 1969. While there he met Kurt Goldstein, who had originated the idea of self-actualisation in his famous book, The Organism (1934). It was also here that he began his crusade for a humanistic psychology – something ultimately much more important to him than his own theorising.

He spend his final years in semi-retirement in California, until, on June 8 1970, he died of a heart attack after years of ill health.

Maslow’s contribution to psychology

Many psychologists have made impacts on society’s understanding of the world. Abraham Maslow was one of these; he brought a new face to the study of human behaviour. He called his new discipline, “Humanistic Psychology.” His family life and his experiences influenced his psychological ideas. After World War II, Maslow began to question the way psychologists had come to their conclusions, and though he didn’t completely disagree, he had his own ideas on how to understand the human mind.

Humanistic psychologists believe that every person has a strong desire to realise his or her full potential, to reach a level of “self-actualisation”. To prove that humans are not simply blindly reacting to situations, but trying to accomplish something greater, Maslow studied mentally healthy individuals instead of people with serious psychological issues.

This influenced his theory that people experience “peak experiences”, high points in life when the individual is in harmony with himself and his surroundings. In Maslow’s view, self-actualised people can have many peak experiences throughout a day while others have those experiences less frequently.

Maslow and motivation hierarchy

Motivation can be traced to the Latin word movere, which means “to move”. That’s why we call it the motive for action. Motivation is a term that refers to a process that elicits, controls, and sustains certain behaviours. It is also a group of phenomena which affect the nature of an individual’s behaviour, the strength of the behaviour, and the persistence of the behaviour.

According to Luthans (2002), motivation is a process that starts with a physiological or psychological deficiency or need that activates behaviour or a drive that is aimed at a goal or incentive. For instance, when one has not eaten, he or she feels hungry, as a response he or she eats and diminishes feelings of hunger.

Abraham Maslow in his paper, A Theory of Human Motivation, way back in 1943 elaborates on the contents of motivation. Today we call it a content theory of motivation, that talks of the what part of it. Subsequently there were process theories of motivation, that talk of the “how” part of it. Maslow use the terms physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualisation to describe the pattern that humans generally get motivated. Figure 1 illustrates Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people. He states that “the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy”. His study involved the healthiest 1% of the college student population.

Levels in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Maslow proposed five levels of needs in his hierarchy. They, as shown in figure one can be further described as follows:

Physiological needs

These include the most basic needs that are vital to survival, such as the need for water, air, food, and sleep. Maslow believed that these needs are the most basic and instinctive needs in the hierarchy because all needs become secondary until these physiological needs are met.

Security needs

These include needs for safety and security. Security needs are important for survival, but they are not as demanding as the physiological needs. Examples of security needs include a desire for steady employment, health insurance, safe neighbourhoods, and shelter from the environment.

Social needs

These include needs for belonging, love, and affection. Maslow considered these needs to be less basic than physiological and security needs. Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments, and families help fulfil this need for companionship and acceptance, involvement in social, community, or religious groups.

Esteem needs

After the first three needs have been satisfied, esteem needs becomes increasingly important. These include the need for things that reflect on self-esteem, personal worth, social recognition, and accomplishment.

Self-actualising needs

This is the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualising people are self-aware, concerned with personal growth, less concerned with the opinions of others, and interested fulfilling their potential.

Maslow coined the term meta needs or meta-motivation to further elaborate on self-actualising needs. Let’s discover more on this.

More on Meta needs

According to Maslow (1968), people’s basic needs must be sufficiently gratified before they can pursue the fulfilment of what he calls the higher, transcendent meta-needs related to self-actualisation. Maslow asserted that people’s complete psychological maturation occurs only when their potentialities are fully developed and actualised. Maslow defined certain unique characteristics of self-actualising people.

Such a person, they maintained, has the following: an accurate perception of reality, a high level of creativity, few defences, a high level of integration, personal autonomy, unconventional ethics, a need for human kinship, compassion, humility, deep and harmonious interpersonal relationships, a respect for others, a desire to establish new forms of communications and intimacy, and an ongoing concern with personal growth.

Maslow (1954) highlighted these characteristics: spontaneity, receptivity, a problem-centred approach to life, detachment, a fresh appreciation of things, a democratic attitude, a unique value system, a capacity to cope with circumstances, and a likelihood of having peak experiences. Rogers (1961) added, moreover, these qualities: openness to nature and other people, an unconditional self-regard, an inner freedom, authenticity, a yearning for a spiritual life, an indifference to material comforts, a feeling of closeness to nature, and scepticism of science and technology.

Strengths and shortcomings

Maslow was the first to popularised motivation as a series of need accomplishment. As much as he was right, others pointed out his shortcomings as well. While some research showed some support for Maslow’s theories, there are issues with regard to the sequence.

Is it always required to follow the same sequence in fulfilling one’s needs? Can’t the affiliation needs come first, than the safety needs? Can’t there be possibilities of satisfying the needs parallel than sequentially? These are the questions Maslow did not provide clear answers.

Other criticisms of Maslow’s theory note that his definition of self-actualisation is difficult to test scientifically. His research on self-actualisation was also based on a very limited sample of individuals, including people he knew as well as biographies of famous individuals that Maslow believed to be self-actualised, such as Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Regardless of these criticisms, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs represents part of an important shift in psychology. Rather than focusing on abnormal behaviour and development, Maslow’s humanistic psychology was focused on the development of healthy individuals.

While there was relatively little research supporting the theory, hierarchy of needs is well-known and popular both in and out of psychology. In a study published in 2011, researchers from the University of Illinois set out to put the hierarchy to the test. What they discovered is that while fulfilment of the needs was strongly correlated with happiness, people from cultures all over the reported that self-actualisation and social needs were important even when many of the most basic needs were unfulfilled.

Way forward

Maslow the motivator has moved us to know ourselves better. That itself proves the power of his thoughts. Reality is that we have moved beyond his ideas in discovering deeper. Yet, the credit still goes to him for his pioneering efforts. Sri Lankan managers can grasp the fundamentals of Maslow’s need hierarchy to design and deliver motivational programs for their employees. Moreover, it paves the way to achieve mega results with a motivated team.

(Dr. Ajantha Dharmasiri is a learner, teacher, trainer, researcher, writer and a thinker in the areas of Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour. He can be reached on [email protected].)