Fundamental Flaw In Maslow's Pyramid

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Fundamental Flaw In Maslow's Pyramid

As convincing as Maslow looks at first sight, there is a fundamental error in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. His pyramid is driven by self-actualization, i.e. egocentrism. But MEANING matters more.
"The man who has a why to live bears almost every how." as the Austrian psychologist Victor Frankl emphasized. But meaning takes place on every stage of the pyramid or not. The pyramid suggests that meaning increases the closer you come to the top and this is just not the case. “Only in the degree man fulfills meaning, to this very degree he fulfills himself: Then individual fulfillment is reached on its own – as an effect of self actualization, and not as its aim.”

For example, a teacher might be paid less than a manager, nevertheless he will regard his work not as less meaningful. A manager might receive an extraordinary high payment, nevertheless he will suffer from burn-out, if he is working hard, but does not find anymore meaning in what he is doing.

It is not the task of managers to create meaning for people but it is their responsibility to enable as many persons as possible to find meaning by fulfilling their task by way of designing organization.
The hypocrisy of managers is to pretend that they create value to their customers, but treating their own people in an inconsistent, unaccountable way, making it hard for them to find meaning.

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		0 Eric de Rochefort Business Consultant, France
	Self-fulfillment and Managerial Performance Hi Bernhard, Not sure to agree with your qualification that what Abe meant by self-actualization equates with egocentrism, but more interesting is your description of a manager's task with which I wholeheartedly agree. As Maslow's friend Doug McGregor could have said, "the graal of management should be to create the environment in which the easiest way for employees to reach their individual goals is simply to attain corporate goals". This would be a nice piece of design, wouldn't it be? Just my two cents ;o).

		1 Jaap de Jonge Editor, Netherlands
	Meaning in Maslow's Pyramid According to Maslow, people have different needs in different situations, life stages, etc. There is a hierarchy in them to some extent, although this should not be taken too strictly or literally. The bottom 2 stages of Maslow's pyramid have little to do with meaning. If someone is almost dying from thirst or hunger (layer 1) or in the middle of a war and immediately threatened by bullets (layer 2), he probably won't worry too much about the meaning of things. However, the top 3 levels of the pyramid are in my view all about meaning? And agreed, if you want to motivate your people (as a manager), you'd better know what their collective and individual needs, values, drivers are in order to be able to match those in one way or the other to the interests of the organization.

		1 Eric de Rochefort Business Consultant, France
	Meaning and Management Absolutely Jaap! Meaning is what it is all about 😉 And as you say, to motivate your people (as a manager) often requires a better understanding of people than we usually have, and Abe' formulating of his Hierarchy of Needs was by his own admission a 'work in progress'. Actually, when one goes carefully through Maslow's writings, it quickly emerges that he was intellectually daring but also extremely humble. As such he was often keen to remark (in writing ;o) that a lot of his ideas were just that, that they needed to be tested, challenged and proven or discarded. It is also this kind of elegance that made him such a towering figure as he promoted humanistic (or "third wave") psychology. One of the most glaring examples of this is his short "Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences" book. By the way, this current agitation about generative AI (despite all the huge benefits it will undeniably bring) often misses the fact that - for the time being - AI has absolutely nothing to do with meaning. "AI doesn't write, it calculates". Amazingly and mind-blowingly well, but it still merely calculates. To come back to our subject about motivating people, the model used in Theory P http://tinyurl.com/7bj5mh32 describing human behavior (in a broad sense) as being driven by Values (choices), shaped by Thought Preferences (information-processing) and enacted though Style (acting/reacting) seems a bit more inclusive and robust than many others - at least when it comes to usefulness for management purposes. Again, just my two cents ;o).