Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory

The Hierarchy of needs theory is a formation of the needs of an individual person. Basically this hierarchy are based on five level which is classified into Physiological needs, Safety needs, Love/Belonging needs, Esteem needs and Self-actualization needs. It can be illustrated with a diagram 1.0 The Diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.

This is diagram are has been developed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper of A Theory of Human Motivation which he subsequently extended to include his observation of humans’ innate curiosity. Therefore by understanding the needs of an individual, we might able to realize the behavior of a human being needs.

Diagram 1.0 The Diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs

Deficiency needs

In the first four layers of the pyramid which are the needs of Physiological needs, Safety needs Love and Belonging needs and Esteem needs can be identify as the Deficiency needs. If an individual are not met, the body gives no indication of it physically, but the individual feels anxious and tense.

Physiological needs

Physiological needs are the basic needs of human in order to survive. To understand, these are the needs such as food, cloths, air and other bodily needs. If a person is hungry or thirsty, all of their energies turn towards remedying these deficiencies and other needs remain inactive. These are the needs, which every person needs to fulfill in order to survive.

Undoubtedly these physiological needs are the most pre-potent of all needs. What this means specifically is, that in the human being who is missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that the major motivation would be the physiological needs rather than any others. Therefore a person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else.

The physiological needs of the organism (those enabling homeostasis) take first precedence. These consist mainly of excretion, eating, drinking and breathing. If some needs are not fulfilled, a person’s physiological needs take the highest priority. Physiological needs can control thoughts and behaviors and can cause people to feel sickness, pain and discomfort.

Safety needs

A point that Maslow stresses is that a person cannot move to the next level of the hierarchy until the present level is fully achieved. If the physiological needs are relatively well gratified, there then emerges a new set of needs, which categorize, as the safety needs. These needs have to do with people’s yearning for a predictable, orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control, the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare. In the world of work, these safety needs manifest themselves in such things as the preference for job security, grievance procedures for protecting the individual from unilateral authority, saving accounts, insurance policies and the like.

Generally the safety needs in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are classified into three types. The types are:

a) Probable Harm

b) Physical Safety

c) Psychological Safety

Probable Harm

Employee constantly predict the future in order to help decide what they should do next and also over long term. When they predict that they are likely to come to some harm then they feel unsafe. The greater the potential harm and the greater the likelihood of this happening, the more unsafe we feel.

Physical safety

Physical safety means freedom from physical harm. Such harm can come form other people, such as when a mugger threatens us, or it can come from the environment such as when we are standing in a burning building.

Psychological safety

Although Maslow does not highlight this, we can feel just as unsafe when faced with the taunts of our peers as we do when faced with the knife of a mugger. Psychological safety is, of course, �all in the mind’, and this intangible nature can make it difficult to handle. It can also be difficult to make the decision as to whether the threat is intended and real or not.

We can also psychological threaten ourselves, as he little voice in side berates us for our wrongdoings. We cannot get away from the repeated self-harming cycles of recurring memories or future projections and