In management and in industrial and organizational psychology, Maslow’s theory of needs and motivation is considered to be true at least in its core, and it is believed that it can be applied to the behavior of people in the world of work. Maslow himself was more critical here:
Of course, one could argue that Maslow did not correctly assess how generalizable his theory is. I mean, we should take Maslow’s scepticism as a model.
I no longer teach Maslow’s need theory in my HRM classes, although it is an crucial part of the history of behavioral and motivation theory. The reason for this is that students usually only remember Maslow’s pyramid of needs in their exams regarding behavioral theories, while other and better proven theories (e.g. the expectancy theories or the theory of social learning) recede into the background. This may have something to do with the fact that the representation of Maslow’s theory in graphic form is much easier to remember than representations of other theories. The simple representation could also be a cause of its popularity in management theory: It is very easy to make a PowerPoint slide with the pyramide of needs, and it is also easy to teach the basic idea. It is not that easy with the expectancy theory or the social learning theory. (Apart from that, the theory can be used to justify nearly any practical recommendation, for instance for the design of wage sysems, cf. Nienhüser 1998).
Maslow himself would have been reluctant to give recommendations for designing the world of work.
References
- Maslow, A.H. 1965: Eupsychian management. Homewood, IL: Irwin.
- Nienhüser, W. 1998: Die Nutzung personal- und organisationswissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse in Unternehmen. Eine Analyse der Bestimmungsgründe und Formen auf der Grundlage theoretischer und empirischer Befunde. In: Zeitschrift für Personalforschung, 1998, 12. Jg., H. 1, S. 21-49. PDF zum download), danke an Rainer Hampp-Verlag; die im PDF fehlende Abbildung von Seite 28 finden Sie hier.
* Source of the picture: I don’t have the copyright for the picture, let me know if this is a probem. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abraham_Maslow.jpg.