Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Abraham H. Maslow · 1943

People attend to basic needs before higher ones, and what motivates someone depends on which are already met.

Its place in the frameworkBusiness Core›HR

What it does

Physiological needs, safety, belonging, esteem and self-actualisation, each becoming pressing as the one below it is satisfied. Its practical use at work is narrow but real: an offer of purpose and growth lands very differently on someone who is worried about whether the job still exists in six months.

Reach for it when: When engagement work reaches for meaning and mastery while pay, workload or job security are unresolved.
Where it stops: The pyramid was not Maslow’s and the strict ordering has not held up in research — people pursue several levels at once, and cultures order them differently. It is a useful reminder, not a sequence to manage by.

Abraham H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation”, Psychological Review, 1943.

Why it sits at HR

The people the organisation has, the people it needs, and everything between the two. HR is where capability stops being an abstraction and becomes a headcount with names attached.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

Workforce planningStrategic workforce planning practice, and the resource-based view’s treatment of human capital as a source of advantage rather than a cost line.
Recruitment and selectionSelection validity research, which consistently finds structured methods outperform unstructured interviews by a wide margin.
DevelopmentHuman capital theory on the build-or-buy choice, and the seventy-twenty-ten distinction between learning on the job, from others, and from formal training.
Retention and engagementWork on turnover cost and on the difference between satisfaction and engagement — the second predicts discretionary effort, the first mostly predicts staying.

All of HR

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at HR lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Goal CoreAlmost every tactical goal eventually becomes a question of who will do it.
Goal CoreCore values sit with purpose, and they are enacted through hiring and departure decisions rather than through statements.
Brand CoreHow the organisation treats people is part of what it is understood to be.
Data CoreCapability, turnover and time-to-hire are measurable, and mostly are not measured.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at HR too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

Tuckman’s stages of group developmentTeams pass through forming, storming, norming and performing, and the difficult stage is not a failure of the team.
Belbin Team RolesPeople contribute to a team in recognisable ways, and a team of one kind fails in a predictable direction.
Herzberg’s two-factor theoryWhat makes people dissatisfied at work and what motivates them are two different lists, not two ends of one.
Kotter’s eight-step change modelEight steps for changing how an organisation works, beginning with urgency and ending with making the change stick.
Situational leadershipThere is no single right way to lead — the right amount of direction depends on how ready the person is for that particular task.

Elsewhere in Business Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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