Abraham Maslow published “A Theory of Human Motivation” in 1943. It had no diagram. It had a list of needs, from hunger up to what he called self-actualization, and a warning that the list should not be read as a staircase. People, he wrote, are “partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time.”
Management found the paper through Douglas McGregor. In 1956 McGregor wrote to Maslow after presenting the idea to a group of senior executives: it “fired their imagination because of its implications in industry.” When McGregor sent him a speech built on the theory, Maslow replied that he had done “a very fine job.”
In his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, McGregor put it more bluntly than Maslow had: “The man whose lower-level needs are satisfied is not motivated to satisfy those needs. For practical purposes they exist no longer.”
Then came the pictures. Keith Davis’s 1957 textbook Human Relations in Business drew the needs as steps inside a right-angled triangle, with a man in a business suit raising a flag at the top. In 1960 Charles McDermid, a consulting psychologist, published “How Money Motivates Men” in Business Horizons. He arranged the needs as a pyramid and told managers to use it to assess their employees and adjust pay accordingly, since “maximum motivation at lowest cost is the desired end result.”
For years the theory was drawn other ways too. A Google n-gram search by the historians suggests a ladder was a common picture until the 1980s, when the pyramid took over, carried by the new management textbooks.
In 2019 Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard published the story of how it got there. They read Maslow’s published work and diaries and went through his papers in the archives at the University of Akron. “We found no trace of Maslow framing his ideas in pyramid form.”
Maslow lived for a decade after McDermid’s article, and the historians found no evidence that he ever challenged the pyramid. They don’t read that as approval. His diaries show a man who felt underappreciated and was dealing with poor health and money worries. Recognition from business, and the speaking fees that came with it, may also have played a part.
The picture students still learn first shows each need as a floor you finish before you climb. The paper it is named after said most people are partly satisfied, and partly not, on every floor at once.