Simplicity isn’t always helpful. Maslow’s “pyramid of needs”—never actually intended as a pyramid by its creator—remains one of management’s most seductive fictions. Its apparent clarity is as compelling as it is misleading, both oversimplifying motivation and lacking genuine empirical support. The promise of neat progression—fulfilling basic needs before advancing to belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation—reflects a Western, individualist perspective that erases cultural and contextual complexity. Moreover, it elevates autonomy, self-expression, and achievement as universal goods, while marginalising solidarity, sacrifice, and obligation.
Maslow’s original research, drawn from a narrow sample, could never justify such sweeping claims. Cross-cultural studies have long dismantled the notion of a fixed sequence: needs arise interdependently, shaped by power, history, and collective meaning. The pyramid’s categories—“esteem,” “belonging,” “self-actualisation”—lack analytical rigour, dissolving under scrutiny as cultural artefacts rather than scientific facts. Early positive psychologists recognised this ideological reduction: Maslow’s framework wilfully disregards the shadow side of human life—conflict, regression, ambivalence. By focusing single-mindedly on positive growth, it represses the tragic and conflicted dimensions of development, reducing individuation to “selfism” (Paul Vitz).
But the greatest harm lies in the model’s fragmentation of motivation within management and HR. Dividing “basic” from “higher” needs is profoundly simplistic: all needs are socially mediated, and the way we work is always permeated by meaning, status, and power. Maslow’s legacy in management has encouraged the proliferation of facile heuristics—“work-life balance,” “living wages,” “employee engagement”—that separate, postpone, or instrumentalise so-called “higher” needs for productivity, disregarding their entanglement with every dimension of organisational life.
Most perniciously, the pyramid renders inequality and exclusion as technical problems rather than moral ones. By implying that meaning and agency must wait, it legitimises systems that defer dignity for many and reserve fulfilment for the privileged few.
The social world is a social product and cannot be transformed without first being properly understood. Rather than propagating simplistic heuristics in HR and management, we must confront the genuine complexity, conflict, and social foundations of human flourishing.
It’s time to topple the pyramid.