Only those needs which are not satisfied act as motivators.

• Physiological needs are deemed to be the lowest- level needs. These needs include the need for food, oxygen, sex, and drink.
  • So long as physiological needs are unsatisfied, they exist as a driving or motivating force in a person's life. A hungry person has a felt need. This felt need sets up both psychological and physical tensions that manifest themselves in overt behaviors directed at reducing those tensions (getting something to eat). Once the hunger is sated, the tension is reduced, and the need for food ceases to motivate. At this point (assuming the needs for sex, drink, and other physiological requirements are also satisfied) the next higher order need becomes the motivating need.
• Thus, safety needs -- the needs for shelter and security -- become the motivators of human behavior.
  • Safety needs include a desire for security, stability, dependency, protection, freedom from fear and anxiety, and a need for structure, order, and law. In everyday life, we may see this as a need to be able to fall asleep at night, secure in the knowledge that we will awake alive and unharmed. In the workplace this needs translates into a need for at least a minimal degree of employment security; the knowledge that we cannot be fired on a whim and that appropriate levels of effort and productivity will ensure continued employment.
• Social needs include the need for belongingness and love.
  • Generally, as gregarious creatures, human have a need to belong. In the workplace, this need may be satisfied by an ability to interact with one's coworkers and perhaps to be able to work collaboratively with these colleagues.
• After social needs have been satisfied, ego and esteem needs become the motivating needs.
  • Esteem needs include the desire for self-respect, self-esteem, and the esteem of others. When focused externally, these needs also include the desire for reputation, prestige, status, fame, glory, dominance, recognition, attention, importance, and appreciation.
• The highest need in Maslow's hierarchy is that of self-actualization; the need for self-realization, continuous self-development, and the process of becoming all that a person is capable of becoming.

Consider your own need for air. Except as you are deprived of it, it has no appreciable motivating effect upon your behavior.

When man's social needs... are thus thwarted, he behaves in ways which tend to defeat organizational objectives. He becomes resistant, antagonistic, uncooperative.

Douglas MacGregor, in attempting to explain the extent to which one may observe Theory X - type behavior in many organizations, suggests that organizations do little to satisfy their employee's higher-order needs (Social and Esteem). In general, a pay cheque allows employees to satisfy their lower order needs (Physiological and Safety).