Maslow – More than a Theory of Motivation
Glenda @ Mitchell News
Be intentional about what you choose to do. Be intentional about actually doing it.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
More than a Theory of Motivation
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*Hot Off The Press*
April was another month of family visits – this time it was my brother and sister-in-law from North Queensland.
Our garden is starting to look good. We now have a lemon, a lime and an orange tree to add to the bananas, figs, mulberries, guava and passion fruit.
Easter weekend was spent in Brisbane visiting friends and my 93-year-old mother. Easter Sunday also happened to be our 34th wedding anniversary, so we took the opportunity to celebrate whilst in the city.
Last month’s topic, Busyness – The New Status Symbol – generated a huge response from readers. It led to many people pondering their own lives. Some realised they needed to un-busy themselves, perhaps before they were forced to do so. Others were challenged in a different way, coming to terms with the fact that they need to become more comfortable with the quieter season they’re in, recognising it’s not a measure of their value.
After a complex subject last month, I thought I was going to keep it simple this time. Quicker for me to write and easier for you to read. I assumed that most readers would have come across Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – even if in a rudimentary way and not knowing that is what it is called.
However, the more I researched the topic, the more I uncovered. Even if you thought you knew all there is to know about this model used in educational, leadership and motivational settings, I encourage you to read on – you may be surprised.
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*Maslow – More than a Theory of Motivation*
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the kind of “see it everywhere, can’t remember where you learned it” concept that pops up every so often in conversations about leadership, psychology, social issues and self-improvement.
Once you hear or read about the hierarchy and its applications you will notice its influence everywhere, including business management theories and educational models.
Use of the concept has even crept into what I’ll refer to as laymen speak where someone has heard the concept and found it to be logical.
The Theory as We Know It
The hierarchy was originally conceived by American psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943. Commonly depicted as an upright triangle, it has been described as depicting the link between a number of levels of need. The corresponding theory poses that each level must be sufficiently met before someone is prepared to tackle the next level. It is said that Maslow assumed, with the fulfillment of one level, humans will generally develop a longing to fulfill the next.
“Human needs arrange themselves in hierarchies of pre-potency,” Maslow wrote in the 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Needs,” which first described the model. “That is to say, the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior satisfaction of another, more pre-potent need. Man is a perpetually wanting animal.”
Level 1: Physiological needs
According to Maslow, the most essential human needs are the ones that keep us alive, like food, water, shelter and air. Without this basic level of survival, a person cannot be expected to do much in the way of higher thinking or achievement.
“A person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else,” Maslow explained in his paper. Everything else, he suggested, has to come after.
Level 2: Safety needs
With basic needs fulfilled, the next level of needs moves to safety. These are things like financial security, freedom from fear, stable health and anything that can provide our day-to-day lives with a level of predictability and security.
Maslow argued that it is this level of safety-seeking that leads humans to prize systems that bring order to their existence, perhaps in the form of law or religion. Some challenges to this level, he suggested, could be “wild animals, extremes of temperature, criminals, assault and murder, (and) tyranny.”
Level 3: Needs of belonging
Once basic survival and a minimum level of security are established, human needs change a little bit. The third level of the hierarchy includes concepts like friendship, community, love, shared experiences and anything that gives humans a sense of belonging among themselves.
In this model, Maslow assumed, with the fulfillment of levels 1 and 2, humans will generally develop a longing to fulfill the next level.
“Now the person will feel keenly, as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart, or a wife, or children,” Maslow wrote. “He will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general, namely, for a place in his group, and he will strive with great intensity to achieve this goal. He will want to attain such a place more than anything else in the world and may even forget that once, when he was hungry, he sneered at love.”
Level 4: Esteem needs
The top of Maslow’s Hierarchy — the ultimate condition of human opportunity — has to do with self-actualisation. But first, humans must fulfill needs of esteem. Esteem, in this sense, refers to a person’s sense of self and their sense of self in relation to others. This level includes things like dignity, personal achievement and maybe even a sense of prestige in a certain area.
“Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability and adequacy of being useful and necessary in the world,” Maslow wrote.
Level 5: Self-actualisation needs
Finally, once a person has all they need to survive, function, and understand their position in the world and their community, they can enter the final portion of the hierarchy. Self-actualisation can mean many things, but many of the examples centre on a desire to explore, create or expand ones skills. Concepts like beauty, aesthetics and discovery translate into real-world examples like art, learning a new language, refining one’s talents and becoming the best one can be.
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy,” Maslow wrote. “What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation.”
Application of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
“Maslow saw his hierarchy as falling within a theory of motivation,” Charlie Huntingon wrote for the Berkeley Well-Being Institute. “By looking at the ways your own behaviours follow – and deviate from – the hierarchy, you may gain insight into what motivates you.”
Aside from its psychological application, countless disciplines have found Maslow’s model to be a useful teaching tool. Some education professionals refer to the hierarchy when assessing educational or behavioural challenges among students by trying to identify where their needs are not being met.
Similarly, the hierarchy is used in some business leadership theories as a guide to support employees and build a healthy organisation.
Race and social justice advocates have used this hierarchy as a model to explain how basic inequalities significantly hinder underserved people’s upward mobility.
“Experiencing food insecurity, having inadequate housing, or being overworked does not inherently make us unable to experience moments of genuine happiness, contentment, and ease,” the YWCA, a women’s rights organisation, states in an article about race, poverty and well-being. “However, experiences such as food insecurity, inadequate housing, or being overworked disadvantage us in our quest to live well. They present barriers that must be overcome, challenges that must be faced, and equate us with worry for the possibility of our most basic needs not being met, jeopardizing our first desire, to live.”
Still, many experts consider the concept to be a useful way of approaching personal wellbeing and larger questions about potential.
There’s More to Maslow than the Pyramid
I first learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in 1986, my first year at university. Since then, I have had it referenced and referenced it myself in various motivational and leadership contexts. I felt pretty confident that I knew what it was about.
However, the more I researched the topic for this article, the more I uncovered about the misconceptions, misunderstanding and misquotes.
Over time, various thinkers have tweaked and re-visualised Maslow’s hierarchy in different ways; expounding on or splitting the levels, or proposing models where needs are differently ordered. There is a seven-stage and then an eight-stage model later developed during the 1960s and 1970s. The general idea remains the same, however: Humans have different sets of needs that rely upon each other, and one must have basic needs fulfilled before they can reach their potential.
While many people find Maslow’s hierarchy of needs useful, it’s important to remember the model is just one way of thinking about human psychology, and wasn’t posed as, and isn’t considered, a scientific absolute. Common challenges to Maslow’s model argue that it is too arbitrary, or that human needs exist more as a cascading spectrum.
In reading several reviews of the theory, there were critical evaluations of his findings. For example:
- it was purported that Maslow used limited samplings of self-actualised people including biographies and writings of 18 people he identified as being self-actualised. He was also deemed to have used personal opinion which is prone to bias and reduces the validity of the data obtained.
- Maslow’s work centred around the humanistic approach but he never created the pyramid. Maslow did not himself use a pyramid. GASP!
There is said to be little or no evidence that Abraham Maslow himself ever represented his Hierarchy of Needs as a pyramid. According to an article in Scientific American, a business management consultant created Maslow’s pyramid. The paper states that the pyramid was a visual shortcut for Maslow’s Hierarchy created by Douglas McGregor, Keith Davis, and Charles McDermid to introduce the Hierarchy of Needs in management training and textbooks.
The simplicity of the diagram is perhaps one reason this formulation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is so well known. They indicate that “most criticisms of Maslow’s theory are actually critiques of McGregor’s interpretation of Maslow”. - In the generally used model as described above, it is deemed that Maslow determined that with the fulfillment of one level, humans will generally develop a longing to fulfill the next. But based on references to his original notes, this is considered untrue. While Maslow did believe there was a Hierarchy of Needs, he didn’t argue that we had to meet one need completely before meeting other needs.
The biggest learning
Here’s something many don’t know:
In 1938, Maslow lived amongst a First Nation people group in Canada to test his theory. He spent six weeks with them, observing their culture and social systems. He was deeply impressed by their values of community and interconnectedness, The Blackfoot Tribe integrates the self, community, and nature into their way of life which stood in stark contrast to the individualism of Western societies.
As Blackfoot scholar Billy Wadsorth summarises: Maslow did not “fully situate the individual within the context of community.” If he had done so, and also more deeply integrated the Blackfoot perspective, “the model would be centred on multi-generational community actualisation versus on individual actualisation.”
Maslow himself may have agreed with this critique. In 2020, Scott Barry Kaufman shared an excerpt from an unpublished Maslow essay from 1966, 23 years after he published his paper on the Hierarchy of Needs, called “Critique of Self-Actualization Theory”,
…self-actualisation is not enough. Personal salvation and what is good for the person alone cannot be really understood in isolation. The good of other people must be invoked as well as the good for oneself.
The community plays a part in satisfying the needs of the individual. Whilst we largely use it as an individual model, the First Nation people could not separate the individual from the community. In overly simplistic terms, if the need wasn’t satisfied, the community satisfied it.
He learned more than he bargained for
Maslow joined the Blackfoot Tribe to test his theory that social hierarchies are maintained by dominance. Instead, he found a society built on restorative justice, cooperation, minimal poverty, and high levels of life satisfaction. He estimated that “80–90 percent of the Blackfoot tribe had a quality of self-esteem that was only found in 5–10 percent of his own population.” As Blackfoot scholar Ryan Heavy Head noted, “Maslow saw a place where what he would later call self-actualisation was the norm.”
Maslow described self-actualisation as “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. For the Blackfoot, self-actualisation wasn’t a destination; it was the starting point. Their community nurtured each person’s inherent potential, helping individuals flourish in ways that benefited the whole.
The Blackfoot belief is not a triangle. It is a tipi where they believe tipis reach to the sky. Self-actualisation is at the base of the tipi, not at the top, and is the foundation on which community actualisation is built. The Blackfoot saw self-actualisation as the foundation of life itself. From this secure sense of fulfillment, people contributed to their community and the world. Personal growth was a natural and collective process, not an individual climb to the top.
In contrast, Maslow’s model reflects Western ideals of competition and achievement. It positions self-actualisation as something to strive for after meeting physiological and material needs, which can exclude those living in poverty or facing systemic barriers.
Maslow also observed the Blackfoot’s unique view of wealth. For them, wealth was not measured by money or possessions but by generosity. As he put it, “The wealthiest man in their eyes is one who has almost nothing because he has given it all away.”
During his first week, Maslow witnessed a “Giveaway” ceremony, where tribe members gathered to share all that they had collected over the year. Those with the most possessions told stories of how they had amassed them before giving everything away to those in greater need. This act of abundance and sharing sharply contrasted with the materialism and individualism of Western culture.
When studying those who strayed from community norms, Maslow found that the Blackfoot did not ostracise them. Instead, they embraced a restorative approach. “A person who was deviant could redeem themselves in society’s eyes if they left that behaviour behind,” Maslow observed.
Maslow also noticed the role of child-rearing in fostering high self-esteem. Blackfoot children were treated with great permissiveness and respect and regarded as equal members of society. Despite their freedom, children listened to elders and actively served the community from a young age. This nurturing upbringing built confidence, responsibility, and belonging—qualities foundational to self-actualisation.
Lessons from the Blackfoot for us today
The Blackfoot perspective reflects an abundance mindset: Each person is inherently whole and worthy, and the community’s role is to help them thrive. This difference challenges how we think about personal growth and well-being, offering a powerful critique of Western individualism and its limitations.
Revisiting Maslow’s hierarchy through the Blackfoot lens compels us to rethink key ideas about well-being:
1. Abundance, Not Scarcity: Maslow’s hierarchy assumes people must work their way up from scarcity. The Blackfoot perspective starts with abundance, viewing self-actualization as something everyone inherently possesses.
2. Community Over Individualism: Maslow’s model portrays self-actualization as an individual journey. For the Blackfoot, it’s a collective process. When one person struggles, the whole community steps in to restore balance.
In the words of the band MercyMe “I can only imagine”…
Imagine a world where every person is seen as whole, capable, and worthy from the start. Instead of climbing a ladder toward fulfillment, together we nurture the natural potential within each of us. This approach would prioritise fostering well-being from the very start. It would mean shifting from hyper-individualism to collective care.
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*The 7Ps – To be intentional about what you choose to do and intentional about actually doing it*
The 7Ps model would be considered a model for an individual. It enables a person to make intentional choices about what they are going to do. That said, at the centre of the decision-making process is Passion. The way I describe Passion is those things that are important to you and those around you. Taking the learnings from the Blackfoot and considering the impact your choices make on the community within which you live, how broad will you define Passion? How may this impact your decision-making?
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*Quote of the Month*
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy,”
– Maslow
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*Kicking Out The Bucket List*
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I have referred to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs regularly over the years whether to motivate people, challenge leaders or build awareness of human need. Whilst researching and writing this article, I have not only been challenged to rethink the model but to reassess my own contribution to the needs of the communities within which I live.
Turning the challenge into meaningful action is where the difference lies. I encourage you to share stories of changes you have made.
If you need assistance in assessing your passion and prioritising your actions, please let me know as I’d love to chat about how I can help.
Glenda
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