Saturday, December 7, 2013

Motivation - Maslow's Theory, Theory X and Theory Y

In the last blog, we attempted to understand the role of incentives in motivating people. In today's blog, we look at Maslow's Theory of Hierarchy of Need. 

Maslow's theory of human motivation mentions a hierarchy of five need categories as shown in the picture below. The five categories were labeled 0 physiological needs, safety and security needs, love (social) needs, esteem needs, and the need for self-actualization.

The theory has a distinct feature - that of progression. It is the lowest level of ungratified needs in the hierarchy that motivate behavior. As one level of need is met, a person progresses to the next higher level of need as a source of motivation. Hence, people progress up the hierarchy as they successively gratify each level of need.

In the next blog, we look at understanding the theory x and theory y. We could map the Maslow’s hierarchy theory on to the theory x and theory y pictorially as follows:


No comments:

Post a Comment