Three Studies of Measures of Need Satisfaction in Organizations

1 The authors acknowledge the comments of Pete Dachler, Dick Hackman, Tim Hall and Ed Lawler on earlier drafts of this paper. Data analyses reported in this paper were partially supported by the Computer Science Center, University of Maryland, College Park Campus. Three studies attempting to achieve convergence between different measures designed to assess need satisfaction in organizations are reported.1 Study I showed poor convergence between two measures of Maslow's concepts on a sample of 146 nurses. Study 11 showed poor convergence between Maslow and ERG measures in a sample of 217 bank employees. Study Ill showed some convergence where expected between Maslow and ERG measures for 522 employees in a life insurance company. Study Ill also showed some meaningful correlations between Maslow measures and the Job Description Index measure of job satisfaction and a high degree of convergence between ERG and JDI measures. Discussion of results from the different studies concerns the effect of differences in item format on construct intercorrelations and the need to know intermeasure convergence prior to making interstudy comparisons of results. It is suggested that the failure to find support for Maslow's need categories in organizational settings is due to: (1) an inadequate conceptualization which does not readily facilitate the development of operational indicators, and (2) the initial orientation of Maslow's theory which was not specifically aimed toward organizational settings.