In 1960 a consulting psychologist named Charles McDermid wrote an article for managers in Business Horizons. It was called “How Money Motivates Men,” and it was frank about the goal: “maximum motivation at lowest cost is the desired end result.”
To get there, McDermid borrowed a theory the psychologist Abraham Maslow had published seventeen years earlier, and arranged it as a pyramid. Physiological needs at the base, then safety, social needs, esteem, and self-realization at the peak. A manager could work out where each employee stood on it and set the pay package to match.
It became perhaps the most famous image in management studies, often the first theory of motivation business students meet.
There is no sign Maslow ever drew it.
In 2019 three management historians, Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard, went looking for his pyramid. They read his published work and diaries and went through his papers at the University of Akron. “We found no trace of Maslow framing his ideas in pyramid form.” McDermid’s, they concluded, was probably the first pyramid ever published.
A missing drawing would be trivia. But the shape says something Maslow had already called false.
Plenty of bread
Maslow’s 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” does begin at the bottom. For a man who is “extremely and dangerously hungry,” he wrote, “no other interests exist but food. He dreams food, he remembers food, he thinks about food.” His idea of Utopia is a place with plenty to eat.
Then Maslow added the condition. Hunger like that, he argued, is rare in a peaceful society. “It is quite true that man lives by bread alone,” he wrote, and then: “when there is no bread.” And when the belly is chronically full? Other, “higher” needs emerge and take over.
Bread comes first only when there’s no bread. Otherwise people want many things at once.
A few pages later he warned that he might have given the impression that the needs stand in “a step-wise, all-or-none” relation, as if one had to be satisfied “100 per cent before the next need emerges.” He called that a “false impression.” Most normal people, he wrote, are “partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time.”
To make the point he offered figures he called arbitrary, for illustration only. The average citizen might be satisfied 85 per cent in physiological needs, 70 in safety, 50 in love, 40 in self-esteem and 10 in self-actualization.
Nor was the order fixed. One of his exceptions could happen in any office. A man gives up his job rather than lose his self-respect, starves for six months or so, and then “may be willing to take his job back even at the price of losing his self-respect.”
So where did the stairs come from?
Built by management
Bridgman’s team traces them through the people who carried Maslow into business. Keith Davis’s 1957 textbook drew the needs as stairs, with a businessman raising a flag at the top. In 1960 Douglas McGregor, the author of Theory X and Theory Y, wrote that once a man’s lower-level needs are satisfied, “for practical purposes they exist no longer.” Maslow had written something close, but he had also written that most behavior “tends to be determined by several or all of the basic needs simultaneously,” and McGregor left that out. The same year McDermid squared the stairs off into a pyramid. “The consultants were in the business of building and selling pyramids,” the historians write. The shape also suited its audience. Chris Argyris argued in 1964 that rewards tied to self-actualization “tend to exist primarily for the upper levels of management.” Read that way, the pyramid lines up with the org chart: the people at the bottom of the company are the people still at the bottom of the pyramid.
The theory itself fared poorly in tests. Studies in the 1960s and 1970s failed to confirm parts of it, and a 1976 review of ten studies by Wahba and Bridwell called it “almost a nontestable theory.” Maslow had claimed little proof: of self-actualization, he wrote in 1943, “we do not know much.”
In 2011 Louis Tay and Ed Diener looked at survey data from 123 countries. The link between each need and well-being was “largely independent of whether other needs were fulfilled.” In their data, feeling respected went with more positive feelings even where basic needs went unmet.
The trainer’s job
Say you run a small warehouse team and need someone to train two new hires. Rosa is one of your fastest pickers and the lowest paid on the team. Last month she asked twice for more hours.
Read off the pyramid, Rosa is still on the bottom step. She needs money, so offer her overtime and give the training job to the senior picker who already earns more.
Maslow’s own version doesn’t sort her so neatly. Asking for hours tells you something she lacks, not everything she wants. In his illustration a person is partly fed and partly respected at the same moment, and an offer to teach the new people speaks to the respect.
His version also keeps the exception. If her hours were just cut and rent is due on Friday, the overtime may matter more this month. That is the condition he named: no bread.
Neither reading tells you which month Rosa is having. Asking her does, and she may want both.
Skip the question, and the pyramid builds itself on your team. Overtime goes to the low earners, the chance to teach goes to whoever already earns more, and the people at the bottom of the rota keep getting offered only money.