Maslow Motivation Model

Preparing Consumers to Enter the Workforce:

Maslow’s Model of Motivation

Jim Guthrie

University of North Texas

Theories of human development provide a broad framework for understanding why and how people change as well as what motivates human behaviors. Some theories focus on the early years of life, while other theories encompass development across the lifetime. Abraham Maslow advanced a hierarchical theory of human development that focuses on motivation and personality for maximizing human potential. Maslow’s five-stage Hierarchy of Needs model can be integrated into vocational rehabilitation (VR) to identify and meet the support needs of disabled consumers. This paper seeks to describe how Maslow’s motivation model can be applied by the vocational rehabilitation counselor (VRC) in the developmental process of preparing disabled clients for successful entry into the workforce.

Maslow (1943) proposed a model of basic needs organized in a “hierarchy of relative prepotency” (375). The five-stage model includes: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. This hierarchy is often illustrated as a pyramid with the physiological needs at the base and ascending in order of influence with self-actualization at the apex. Once a need is fulfilled the next higher need will serve to organize the consciousness. In order to form a strategy to best assist consumers the VRC will need to assess each client to determine where they are on the hierarchy. If the consumer’s primary physiological needs (e.g., food, shelter, medical stability) are not being met it is unlikely that they will be motivated to move on to the next higher level.

When a consumer’s physiological needs have essentially been met, their safety...

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... that the VRC assist the consumer in forming realistic vocational goals that are within the reach.

There is much more to Maslow’s developmental approach that is outside the scope of this paper. But even a general understanding of the Hierarchy of Needs is important to the vocational rehabilitation counselor because its methodology offers an approach to motivate consumers who are reluctant to enter the workforce. The VRC is provided with a systematic method of determining a client’s unfulfilled needs in order to formulate interventions that will ultimately satisfy those needs. Entry and assimilation into the workforce is more likely to be successful and long-lasting if the consumer is motivated to achieve and master the five-stages of Maslow’s hierarchy.

References

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370 – 396.