ificance; 4) connection to others; 5) growth and advancement; and 6) contribution. In other words, human beings seek to maximize certainty and comfort while simultaneously learning to cope with uncertainty and variety in that variety understood as diversity, challenges, or excitement, helps to relieve the potential tedium of a work day. People also seek out significance and purpose or meaning in their work while also pursuing a connection with others and with an organization. Growth encompasses learning, changing, expanding, stretching, and improving the self. Finally, most human beings need to feel that they are contributing to others or to an organization or a cause by giving, helping, serving, and ultimately making a difference (Robbins, 1996).
By understanding how each of these six categories of human needs are met or not met within the context of an organization, a supervisor such as myself gains a great deal of insight into the ways in which it becomes possible to motivate and inspire or influence others. Long ago, Herzberg (1959) argued that most people are intrinsically motivated to participate in some type of meaningful work-related activity. However, extrinsic motivators or those forms and sources of motivation that come from outside of the individual must also be in place in any organization that is focused on achieving specific goals and objectives.
It is often asserted that pay is the primary source of motivation in the workplace, but theorists such as Herzberg (1959) and Abraham Maslow (1959) believe that individuals are motivated more significantly and consistently by needs. Maslow, (1959), for example, developed a well-known hierarchy of needs which says that all human behavior stems from needs or drives which are innately biological in origin. In ascending order, Maslow (1959) proposed that individuals first satisfy physiological needs, then safety needs, followed by social needs for affiliation, ego o...