Hierarchy of Needs

What the hierarchy of needs is

The hierarchy of needs is a model of human motivation that arranges human needs into five categories and claims that the order is an order of precedence: the lowest category presses first, and the one above it does not act as a motivator until the one below has been sufficiently satisfied. Abraham Maslow set it out in a paper published in 1943.

It is one of the most prominent models in HR writing, and one of the most used for things it never said. So most of what follows is spent separating what the model claims from what is built on it in management practice without support.

The five categories

• Physiological needs: what the body runs on, such as food, drink and sleep.
• Safety needs: physical safety, a stable income, and the absence of an expected threat.
• Belonging needs: connection with others, acceptance in a group, and relationships that count.
• Esteem needs: recognition for what one achieves, and being regarded as competent by oneself and by others.
• Self-actualisation: reaching what one is capable of, and working at what one sees as an extension of oneself.

In the workplace these categories are matched with particular things: pay, set within a salary structure, and whatever makes a livelihood stable, a setting in which nobody fears for their physical safety, a team to belong to, recognition for what gets done, and a role that stretches what its holder can do. That matching is a matter of usage, not of the model’s text. The model itself does not say that pay is a safety need alone, or that promotion is an esteem need.

Precedence is the claim, and it is weaker than it is reported to be

What distinguishes the model from a plain list of needs is the claim of precedence. In management usage that claim is passed on in a stronger form than the one in which it was made, and the gap between the two forms is the source of most of what is wrongly built on it:

• The form as passed on: a lower need is fully satisfied, and then motivation moves to the one above, like steps where nobody climbs to the second until the first is complete.
• The form as stated: sufficient satisfaction reduces how strongly a need presses and so makes room for the one above, and a person can hold needs from several categories at the same time, to different degrees.

The difference between “fully” and “sufficiently” is not a matter of wording. The first form yields an operating rule: do not talk about recognition before pay is settled. The second yields no rule at all, because it says neither where the sufficient point lies nor how to tell it has been reached. That is the real weakness in how the model is used: it orders, and it does not measure.

What the model does not say, and is usually asked to say

It is most often made to carry three things that are not in it:

• The size of an effect. The model does not say how much motivation rises with more pay or with more recognition, nor which of the two has the larger effect in a given situation. Using it to decide between a pay rise and a recognition programme uses an ordering where a quantity is needed, a use the model neither supports nor rules out.
• Where each individual stands. It contains no instrument that tells you which category a particular employee is in. There is no scale for it that produces a score. The principle behind test validity is that an inference built on a score needs support; here there is no score whose support could even be asked about.
• A verdict on a group. The model is a claim about the individual. Turning it into a description of a whole department or an age group moves the precedence claim from where it was made to somewhere else, with no justification.

The mistake made in designing benefits

The most visible misuse is to arrange HR programmes along the categories in time order: the organisation fixes pay first, then once that is settled moves on to belonging, and then to recognition. The result is a programme that postpones what costs nothing while it waits for what costs money.

The answer to this comes from inside the model: precedence is a property of how strongly a need presses, not a timetable. An employee whose pay is adequate in their own eyes has an active need for recognition now, not in a year, while another employee in the same organisation in the same month may have stability as their first need. An organisation that runs one programme for both on the grounds that “the lower category comes first” spends on one of them what they do not need and postpones for the other what they do.

A spot award is an instrument that fits here: a payment for something that has happened, which nobody can claim in advance and which is not tied to a target. Its value in this context is that it waits for no ordering and does not depend on reaching a threshold anywhere else.

Two opposite cases the model cannot decide between

The clearest way to see the model’s limit is to put a real decision to it. Take two employees in the same department and at the same grade:

• The first has been with the organisation eleven months, is on a contract for a fixed term and has not yet been told what happens when it ends, and was rated above expectations in their first appraisal.
• The second has been there six years, is settled in the work, has done the same job unchanged for three of those years, and has been given no new work.

The model says of the first that the safety need is active and so comes first, and of the second that what lies below is satisfied, so esteem or self-actualisation is at work. Up to this point it is useful: it has signalled that the two are not in the same place, and that one measure applied to both is not a fair measure but merely a uniform one.

Then it stops. The question management faces is how much removing the uncertainty over the first employee’s future weighs against giving the second new work, and which comes first if there is not time for both. Nothing in the model answers it, because the model never established a unit in which the effect of either could be measured. What answers it is what is known about the two cases themselves: what the first said when asked, and what the lack of movement in the second’s role says, which is what the term career plateau describes. What the end of a contract for a fixed term entails is set by the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل) and explained in the English guide to contracts for a fixed or an indefinite term under the Labor Law; the model has nothing to say about it.

Why it is hard to test

There is a methodological point that explains why the debate around it has lasted so long: the model gives no operational definition of either of its two thresholds. It does not say how much satisfaction counts as “sufficient”, nor how to tell that a need has become active.

The consequence is that any observation can be made to agree with it. If an employee on low pay shows an active need for recognition, it can be said that their need for safety is sufficiently met by their own standard. If the reverse appears, it can be said that it was not sufficient. A claim that no observation can contradict is also one that no observation can support. It is the same limit that test validity sets out: an inference that cannot be wrong cannot rest on evidence.

That is why the model works as vocabulary rather than as a tool. It helps to organise a conversation about motivation and to point out that motivation has many sources. It does not help to support a decision on which money is spent.

Two further questions are left open here. We do not decide whether the ordering of the categories is right or wrong, and we do not decide whether it applies in the same way across all cultures. In the sources we reviewed we found nothing that either establishes or refutes the strict form of the precedence claim. What can be said is that the model is an ordering, not a measure, and that every decision that needs a quantity needs evidence from somewhere else.

Terms it gets mixed up with

The distinction that separates the model from these terms is between a claim about what moves a person and a description of a state, a behaviour or a design.

Job satisfaction is a state, measured by asking about aspects of the current job; the hierarchy is a claim about the structure of motivation before anyone is asked anything. An employee can be satisfied and still have an unmet need at work. Engagement is a matter of the extra effort a person puts in. The hierarchy says nothing about effort spent, only about the need that drives it.

Psychological safety is a particular belief: that asking a question or admitting a mistake will not be held against you. It describes the state of a team, not a category of need in an individual, although it is the closest thing at work to the safety need in its social sense. Empowerment rests on declared authority within stated limits, which is an administrative decision in the design of a role, while the hierarchy is a claim about what moves the person holding it.

What remains usable

None of this is an argument for discarding the model. Several things in it are useful when kept within their limits:

• Motivation is not one thing. That alone counters a design built on money as the only evidence of motivation.
• A satisfied need stops driving. This explains why a benefit people have grown used to has a weak effect, and on the other side, why taking it away has a larger effect than adding to it.
• The question comes before the programme. The model points out that needs differ; it does not tell you anyone’s need. So the practical instrument is asking directly about specific aspects of work, not placing people on a level of a pyramid.
• A shortfall shows more than a surplus. This follows from the previous points but deserves its own line, because it reverses the order of spending priorities: fixing what is missing in a category that is active for a group of employees has an effect that expanding a benefit in a category they already have satisfied does not, even though the second is more visible to announce and easier to deliver.

There is also a use as a reverse checklist: ask of each category what is currently taking something away from it in the organisation, not what would add to it. Put that way, the question brings out things that a satisfaction survey does not surface, some of which cost nothing to fix: uncertainty about what follows the end of a contract, no one to turn to on an everyday question, or work that gets done without anyone knowing about it.

Related terms

• Test Validity
• Salary Structure
• Peter Principle
• Intercultural Competence
• Employee Onboarding