PSYCH 658 Week 1 Need and Content Theories of Motivation Example

Why Do People Keep Coming Back to Sort Cans at Six in the Morning? Need Theories Tested Against a Food Bank Warehouse

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/658: Work Motivation and Job Attitudes

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The food bank, its staff, volunteers and survey are composites written for a model paper; theories and research findings come from the sources listed.

Theories of motivation try to explain why people start, direct and sustain effort. The oldest family of theories answers in terms of needs: people act to satisfy deficits or to grow. This paper tests those theories against the people who work and volunteer at the food bank where I manage operations.

The Setting

Our food bank in Phoenix distributes about 1.5 million pounds of food a month to pantries, shelters and school programs across Maricopa County. Forty-two paid staff run the warehouse, drive trucks and manage inventory, and roughly six hundred volunteers a month sort donations, pack boxes and help at distribution sites. This spring, volunteer shifts went unfilled on weekday mornings, and two warehouse leads quit for higher-paying logistics jobs. Our board asked what keeps people here and what we could change.

To ground the discussion, I asked forty-two staff and sixty regular volunteers three open questions: why they first came, why they keep coming and what would make them stop. I coded their answers into categories.

What People Said

Staff most often mentioned pay and benefits, predictable schedules, getting along with coworkers, the chance to lead a crew and knowing the work feeds people. What would make them leave: low pay compared with warehouse jobs elsewhere, unpredictable overtime and supervisors who do not listen. Volunteers most often mentioned helping families in need, friendships formed on regular shifts, feeling useful, especially after retirement, and the satisfaction of seeing a full truck leave. What would make them stop: being treated as cheap labor, disorganized shifts and not knowing whether their work mattered.

Maslow's Hierarchy

Maslow pictured human wants as a staircase: bodily needs and safety on the bottom steps, then belonging, then esteem, with self-actualization at the top, and a person climbing only as each lower step is largely secured. The theory remains popular in management training.

Wahba and Bridwell (1976) reviewed the research testing Maslow's theory and found little support for the hierarchy as a strict sequence. Studies did not consistently find that needs clustered into the five levels Maslow described, nor that satisfying one level made the next more important. The authors noted that the theory was difficult to test because its concepts were loosely defined, but that available evidence did not support a rigid order.

Our responses fit this conclusion. Staff spoke of pay, belonging and leadership in the same breath; volunteers, mostly financially secure retirees, emphasized belonging and contribution, but several younger volunteers who were unemployed also said they came for friendship and purpose, despite unmet financial needs.

Alderfer's Three Needs

Alderfer (1969) proposed a reformulation with three groups of needs: existence, covering material and physical needs; relatedness, covering relationships with others; and growth, covering personal development. Unlike Maslow, Alderfer allowed several needs to operate at once and proposed a frustration-regression principle: when growth needs are blocked, people may focus more on relatedness or existence needs.

This fits our warehouse leads. Both said they would have stayed if a path to supervisor had existed; when that growth seemed blocked, pay elsewhere became decisive. Alderfer's theory explains their departures better than a strict hierarchy.

Two leads left for more money, but both said the money mattered only after the promotion they wanted never came.

McClelland's Learned Motives

McClelland argued that needs for achievement, affiliation and power are learned and vary across people, shaping what work they find rewarding. Spangler (1992) meta-analyzed studies comparing two ways of measuring achievement motivation: implicit measures, such as stories people tell about pictures, and self-attributed questionnaire measures. Both predicted outcomes, but different ones: implicit achievement motives better predicted spontaneous, long-term behavioral trends, such as sustained effort, while self-reported motives better predicted responses to specific, structured choices. Implicit measures predicted behavior especially when tasks offered achievement incentives such as moderate challenge.

Our crew leads who enjoy beating last month's packing totals, and the volunteers who keep returning for the friendships, suggest different dominant motives. A shift design that offers both measurable challenge and social connection might reach both groups.

Herzberg's Two Factors

Herzberg (1968) argued that the factors producing job satisfaction differ from those producing dissatisfaction. Pay, conditions, rules and bosses, in his account, can only keep people from being unhappy; what actually lights them up is the chance to accomplish something, be recognized, own a piece of work and grow. Herzberg urged managers to enrich jobs rather than rely on pay and perks.

Our data partly fit: complaints about leaving centered on pay, overtime and supervision, while reasons for staying included the work's meaning and leadership opportunities. However, later research found that the two-factor pattern depends heavily on the method of asking people to recall good and bad times, which may lead them to credit themselves for good experiences and blame circumstances for bad ones. Pay, for instance, was both a reason to stay and a reason to leave for our staff.

Volunteers and Staff Differ

The comparison between paid staff and volunteers sharpened each theory's limits. For staff, pay and benefits anchor participation; for volunteers, there is no paycheck to explain why they show up at six in the morning in July. Need theories describe volunteers' motives in terms of belonging, esteem and growth, but they do not explain why the same retired volunteer comes every Tuesday for three years while another comes once and never returns. Volunteers who stayed described a regular crew, a lead who knew their names and a clear sense of what their shift accomplished, which points toward how work is organized rather than toward needs alone.

Needs Change Over a Career

Several staff described how their reasons for staying had shifted. A forklift operator in his twenties said he came for the paycheck and stayed because his crew felt like family; a lead in her forties said benefits for her children mattered most now. Need theories treat needs as fairly stable, but our staff's answers suggest that the weight of each need moves with life stage, a pattern Alderfer's flexible model handles better than a fixed ladder.

What the Theories Miss

Need theories describe what people want but say little about how they decide how hard to try, how fairness affects effort or how jobs can be designed to meet needs. They also treat volunteers and staff as similar, though volunteers have no pay to anchor their participation. Later weeks will examine goal, expectancy and equity theories, job design and engagement.

What We Changed First

Even with their limits, the theories pointed to early steps: a posted path from warehouse associate to lead to supervisor, regular volunteer crews that work the same weekday shift so friendships can form and a weekly note to volunteers reporting how many families their shift served.

Conclusion

Need theories capture real motives at our food bank, from pay to friendship to growth, but the evidence does not support a fixed hierarchy, and the two-factor split is less clean than Herzberg claimed. Alderfer's flexible needs and McClelland's learned motives fit our people best, and all four theories leave the design of work itself to later theories.

References

Alderfer, C. P. (1969). An empirical test of a new theory of human needs. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 4(2), 142-175. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(69)90004-X

Herzberg, F. (1968). One more time: How do you motivate employees? Harvard Business Review, 46(1), 53-62.

Spangler, W. D. (1992). Validity of questionnaire and TAT measures of need for achievement: Two meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1), 140-154. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.140

Wahba, M. A., & Bridwell, L. G. (1976). Maslow reconsidered: A review of research on the need hierarchy theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 15(2), 212-240. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90038-6