Читать книгу Foundations of management - Juan Antonio Pérez López - Страница 19

As regards our subject, the motivation to work in business organizations, people are starting to take notice of the work of a number of scientists, mainly from the field of psychology, who study human motivations in general, usually with no specific reference to the business world. Perhaps the most influential figure in this area is Abraham Maslow and his work Motivation and Personality³. Maslow's theory has two different parts:

1. It establishes a hierarchy of human needs.

2. It postulates a dynamism by which the motivations to satisfy these needs appear.

He classifies needs under five headings:

Physiological: Food, rest, protection against the elements, etc.

Security: Protection against possible wants and dangers.

Social: Giving and receiving of affection, feeling accepted by others, etc.

Self-esteem: Appreciation of one's own qualities (professional competence, knowledge, etc.) and feeling appreciated by others.

Self-realization: Development and use of all of one's potential.

Regarding the dynamism by which the motivations to satisfy these needs appear, Maslow's theory postulates that the motivation to satisfy a higher-level need only appears, and is operative, once the lower-level needs are satisfied. Thus, for example, a person will be motivated to seek the satisfaction of his needs for security once his physiological needs are reasonably satisfied; in the same way, he will only seek to satisfy his needs for self-realization once the previous four levels are reasonably satisfied, and so on.

In fact, Maslow's theory is more of a framework to aid observation (and to describe what is observed) than a theory in the true sense of the word. The types of needs it addresses are no more than a series of classifying categories of the entire range of realities that seem to motivate human action.

The advantage of his categories is that they are very open-ended, and in this sense help to avoid the facile simplifications that tend to reduce the motives for human actions to the desire to achieve too-limited objectives (money, comfort, admiration, etc.); as a result of their rich descriptiveness, they tend to draw attention to the breadth and range of goals that people pursue when they act. The main drawback of the framework lies in the lack of nexus with a conception of the human being (its lack of an anthropological theory) that would explain and draw together this series of realities that people seek to obtain through their actions.

Maslow's model is even weaker when it comes to the dynamism postulated to account for the appearance of the motivation that stimulates a person's actions. In many cases people are moved to satisfy higher-level needs (and with motivations so strong that they are prepared to accept any sacrifice to satisfy them) in conditions of almost absolute non-satisfaction of other, lower-level needs. This usually occurs precisely in the case of people we all admire, people who stand out for their human quality.

It must be admitted that Maslow was veiy much aware of the limitations of his approach: he always maintained that his theory was mainly useful as a framework for future research. The exaggerations observed in the implementation of this theory are the result of simplifications made by people in search of support for techniques they wished to develop for immediate practical purposes.