Maslow’s Theory of Human Needs : Basic tool for motivation
Hunger, thirst, security, friendship, respect and being all that you can be are just some of the things that motivate us to take action. This concept helps us to further understand these needs and how they motivate behaviour by showing where they fall in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
India is a huge nation, with a huge number of employed individuals who join hands to eventually increase the workforce and move the nation in its own pace altogether. In a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a staggering 96 per cent of senior executives in India reported that employee experience had been discussed at senior management level. The study was sponsored by Citrix. 54 per cent respondents said that workplaces needed to change the way they treat employees and evolve from the idea of controlling employees to empower them. Perhaps India needs to reshape the employee experience. A more common middle-class Indian’s life of rat-race starts from the 10th standard, followed by a series of competitive exams, and then gushing into a
college, getting a UG degree followed by a 9-to-5 job. The other half of an Indian employee’s life is stuck in a traffic jam or jammed into a local bus with over 40 other 9-to-5 employees. We are bubbling ourselves into a pointless competition rather than self-satisfaction. Motivating employees towards a healthier work environment and “working out of their passion” instead of
“working because they’re forced to earn bread” should be the main motif. Wealth distribution is another key factor followed by the whole ideology of how government employees are monetarily treated as compared to private-sector employees. Properly identifying and studying the actual “needs” and “aims” of a commonplace middle-class Indian employee would rather help in
restructuring our workplace ideologies.
Needs theories attempt to identify internal factors that motivate an individual’s behavior and are based on the premise that people are motivated by unfulfilled needs. Abraham Maslow developed the hierarchy of needs theory. Maslow proposed that motivation is the result of a person’s attempt at fulfilling five basic needs: physiological, safety, social, esteem and self-actualization.
According to Maslow, these needs can create internal pressures that can influence a person’s behavior.
Level I- Physiological needs are the most basic human needs. They included food, water, and comfort. The organization helps to satisfy employees’ physiological needs by a paycheck.
Level II- Safety needs are the desires for security and stability, to feel safe from harm. The organization helps to satisfy workforce or employees’ safety needs by benefits.
Level III- Social needs are the desires for affiliation. They included friendship and belonging. The organization helps to satisfy workforce social needs through sports teams, parties, and celebrations. The supervisor can help fulfil social needs by showing direct care and concern for employees.
Level IV-Esteem needs are the desire for self –respect and respect or recognition from others. The organization helps to satisfy workforce esteem needs by matching the skills and abilities of the workforce to the job. The supervisor can help fulfil esteem needs by showing workers that their
work is appreciated.
Level V- Self-actualization needs are the desires for self- fulfilment and the realization of the individual’s potential. The supervisor can help fulfil self-actualization needs by assigning tasksthat challenge workforce minds while drawing on their aptitude and training.
Maslow believed that these needs exist in a hierarchical order. This progression principle suggests that lower-level needs must be met before higher-level needs. The deficit principle claims that once a need is satisfied, it is no longer a motivator because an individual will take action only to satisfy unmet needs. If you look at this pyramid you can see how Maslow’s needs are organized with basic physiological needs, such as air, food, water and sleep, at the bottom and the idea of self-actualization, or when a person reaches the full potential in life, at the top. Again, according to Maslow, before a person can take action to satisfy a need at any level on this pyramid the needs below it must already be satisfied. Now comparing and selectively studying Maslow’s
theories to an Indian employee’s lifestyle environment is what India needs.
Continually challenging to motivate a workforce to do things. The first challenge is to motivate the workforce to work toward helping the organization achieve its goals. The second is to motivate the workforce to work toward achieving their own personal goals. Meeting the needs and
achieving the goals of both the employer and the workforce is often difficult for managers in all types of organizations. In Indian industry, however, this is often more difficult, in part as a result of the complexity of Indian organizations. The type of workforce runs the gamut from highly
trained and highly skilled technical and clinical staff members to relatively unskilled workers.
Besides, most employers are not effective in their leadership behaviour. They treat workers as machines believing that issues concerning workers should be handled with levity. In India, whilst on one hand the private sector somewhat lacks in motivating the employees monetarily, on the other hand critics remark that Government sector employees are sometimes “over-compensated” which degrades the workforce environment, lest demotivates the employees
from aspiring growth since all needs are served at their fingertips. A balance must be maintained, wealth must be distributed properly and feasibly. The contradiction arrives when we catch glimpse of a government official sitting in a torn-down office with no proper work environment, but earning a six-figure salary per month and a private sector employee working in a well-
furnished work environment catering to the same magnitude of work as a government employee but earning one-third of the former’s salary. This scenario needs to change.
