BEYOND THE PYRAMID: A REAPPRAISAL OF MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS AND ITS RELEVANCE TO HUMAN MOTIVATION, WELLBEING AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, first articulated in 1943, remains among the most widely taught and cited frameworks for explaining human motivation. Presented conventionally as a five-tier pyramid rising from physiological needs through safety, love and belonging, and esteem, to self-actualisation, the model continues to shape practice in education, healthcare, human resource management and social development programming. Yet its enduring popularity has increasingly diverged from its empirical standing. This paper offered a reappraisal of the theory, examining its relevance to human motivation, psychological wellbeing and social development through a structured review of literature and empirical evidence published largely within the last five years. Employing a document-based analytical methodology grounded in secondary data, the paper traced the theory's conceptual foundations, interrogates the historical origin of its now-iconic pyramidal representation, and evaluates its performance against three specific objectives: its explanatory power for workplace and everyday motivation, its capacity to predict subjective wellbeing, and its applicability to non-Western, collectivist and developmental contexts. Drawing on cross-national survey evidence, organisational studies and African Ubuntu-informed critiques, the paper found that while Maslow's identification of universal human needs retains descriptive value, the strict sequential and hierarchical architecture is empirically unsupported and culturally parochial. The paper concluded that Maslow's framework is best retained as a heuristic rather than a predictive scientific theory, and recommended its integration with more empirically robust and culturally sensitive models, including self-determination theory and Ubuntu-based communal frameworks, for contemporary motivation, wellbeing and development practice.