- Maslow's need hierarchy: This is perhaps one of the most widely recognized value
classification. This hierarchy of basic needs reflects value criteria that influence
worker's attitudes toward incentives designed to influence behavior. These needs range
from physiological at the lowest level to metaphysical at the highest level (Figure 1).
The underlying notion is to develop work conditions and incentives that motivate people
according to the needs that have not been satisfied.
- Physiological Needs: These are biological needs. They consist of needs for oxygen, food, water, and a relatively constant body temperature. They are the strongest needs because if a person were deprived of all needs, the physiological ones would come first in the person's search for satisfaction.
- Safety and Security Needs: When all physiological needs are satisfied and are no longer controlling thoughts and behaviors, the needs for security can become active. Adults have little awareness of their security needs except in times of emergency or periods of disorganization in the social structure (such as widespread rioting). Children often display the signs of insecurity and the need to be safe.
- Needs of Love, Affection and belongingness (Social Needs): When the needs for safety and for physiological well-being are satisfied, the next class of needs for love, affection and belongingness can emerge. Maslow states that people seek to overcome feelings of loneliness and alienation. This involves both giving and receiving love, affection and the sense of belonging.
- Needs for Esteem: When the first three classes of needs are satisfied, the needs for esteem can become dominant. These involve needs for both self-esteem and for the esteem a person gets from others. Humans have a need for a stable, firmly based, high level of self-respect, and respect from others. When these needs are satisfied, the person feels self-confident and valuable as a person in the world. When these needs are frustrated, the person feels inferior, weak, helpless and worthless.
- Needs for Self-Actualization: When all of the foregoing needs are satisfied, then and only then are the needs for self-actualization activated. Maslow describes self-actualization as a person's need to be and do that which the person was "born to do." "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write." These needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness. The person feels on edge, tense, lacking something, in short, restless. If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem, it is very easy to know what the person is restless about. It is not always clear what a person wants when there is a need for self-actualization.
Figure 1. Hierarchy of Needs
- People try to fulfill lower-order needs sufficiently before moving on to the higher ones. People will work to satisfy a need, but once it is fulfilled, it is no longer a motivator. This is not an all-or-nothing situation. However, lower order needs must be nearly fulfilled before any higher order need becomes an affective motivator. For example, physiological needs must be nearly fulfilled before a security need becomes a powerful motivator; security need (safe physical and emotional environment) may have to be only 70 per cent fulfilled before triggering the need for affiliation (social belongingness, acceptance by peers and friends). After that is fulfilled to a certain extent, a person may be motivated by esteem need (need to bolster one's self-image). The highest order need is self-actualization, becoming all that is possible for a person to become.
- The classification is helpful for differentiating reward preferences people have in different countries. In some countries, most of the workers may be so deprived that a company can motivate them by concentrating solely on the provision of food and shelter. People from different cultures attach different importance to various needs and may even construct a different hierarchy. For example, self-actualization may be a less effective motivator in a collectivist society than in an individualistic society.
- Work Belief Values: Work belief values may be use to better understand peoples' work value criteria and to design
better motivational systems to influence their behavior (Buchholz, 1976). The dimensions
used to measure these values are:
- Work ethic: Measures the extent to which individuals believe that work is good in itself and bestows dignity on a person.
- Organizational belief: This dimension measures the extent to which individuals believe that work takes on meaning only as it affects the group or organization for which one works and along with one's status and rise in the organizational hierarchy.
- Humanistic belief: Measures the extent to which individuals believe that work is to be taken seriously as the way in which we discover and fulfill ourselves as human beings.
- Marxist-related belief: Measures the extent to which individuals believe that productive activity is basic to human fulfillment. No work, no fulfillment of basic needs.
- Leisure ethic: Measures the extent to which individuals believe that work has no meaning in itself but rather it finds meaning in leisure. Work is a means to an end, necessary to produce goods and services and enable one to earn money to buy them. Fulfillment is found only in leisure activities, pursuing activities of personal interest (see Russell, 1935).
