The Maslow pyramid

Maslow published A Theory of Human Motivation in Psychological Review in 1943. It proposes that human needs fall into groups, and that they tend to emerge in a rough order, with the more basic ones usually pressing first. The paper is careful in a way the famous diagram is not. Maslow states that the order is not rigid, that a need does not have to be fully satisfied before the next one appears, that many people pursue several at once, and that some people invert the order entirely.

There is no pyramid in that paper. There is no pyramid in Motivation and Personality, the 1954 book, either. In 2019, Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard went through the Maslow archives at the Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron looking for one, and reported finding no trace of it anywhere in his work.

What they found instead was that the diagram came from management writing. Keith Davis illustrated the theory as a series of steps in a 1957 textbook, and that version did not catch on. The first recognisable pyramid appeared in 1960, in Business Horizons, drawn by a consulting psychologist named Charles McDermid. His article was called How Money Motivates Men, and his argument was that arranging the needs this way lets a manager produce maximum motivation at the lowest cost. The shape was designed as a budgeting instrument, and it spread through textbooks from there.

The shape carries a claim the theory does not. A pyramid is a structure where each level rests on the one below and cannot exist without it, which reads as a sequence: satisfy this, then move up. That is the reading Maslow rejected. It also produces conclusions nobody would defend if stated plainly, since it implies a person who is hungry has no need for dignity or belonging.

The empirical record is separate from the archival story and points the same way. A review by Wahba and Bridwell in 1976 pulled together the research testing the hierarchy and found little support for the ordering, and later cross-cultural work has found the needs themselves show up widely while the sequence does not. Maslow's own thinking also moved on. In his final years he treated self-transcendence, reaching beyond the self, as sitting above self-actualisation, which the five-level pyramid has no room for.

The staircase is not an abstract error. It produces a specific and expensive decision inside companies.

Watch what happens when someone good resigns. The standard response is money, because the pyramid says the lower levels come first and money sits closest to the bottom. So the counter-offer arrives, it is accepted, and roughly half a year later the person leaves anyway. The thing they were short of was recognition, or autonomy, or work that was going somewhere, and none of that was addressed. The raise treated a level rather than a person.

The same logic runs through engagement work. A survey comes back saying people want growth and meaning, and the response is a benefits review, because the staircase says you cannot sell meaning to someone whose pay is not sorted. The money gets spent, the number does not move, and the survey gets blamed.

And it gives deferral a respectable justification. Founders postpone everything above the base, on the reasoning that autonomy and purpose are things you get to once the company is stable. Stability never arrives on schedule, so the postponement becomes permanent, and it looks disciplined rather than negligent the whole time.

The practical replacement is not complicated. Ask what a particular person is short of right now, out of money, security, belonging, recognition and work that means something. Several of them are usually live at once, in proportions that differ from one person to the next, and the one that matters is rarely the one their salary band would predict.

Source: Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review, volume 50, 1943, pages 370 to 396. The archival history is Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard, Who Built Maslow's Pyramid?, Academy of Management Learning and Education, volume 18, 2019, pages 81 to 98, which traces the first pyramid to McDermid, How Money Motivates Men, Business Horizons, 1960. The empirical review is Wahba and Bridwell, Maslow Reconsidered, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, volume 15, 1976, pages 212 to 240.

Drive

Daniel Pink, 2009

The practical case for autonomy, mastery and purpose, which is the part of Maslow's theory the pyramid buried. Worth reading with one caution: Pink's stronger claim, that extrinsic rewards actively undermine intrinsic motivation, rests on evidence that is still argued over, and some of the studies he builds on sit on the debated shelf here too.