This unit is about what makes a person act at all, and the answer both theorists give is a need that is currently pressing.
Prepotency, not a list
Maslow's 1943 formulation arranges goals in a hierarchy of prepotency. The most prepotent goal monopolises consciousness and organises behaviour.
- When a need is fairly well satisfied, it ceases to be an active motivator, and the next prepotent need emerges to dominate conscious life.
- Gratified needs are not active motivators. That single sentence is what the unit turns on.
The exam tests the mechanism, not a five-level list. Satisfaction does not reinforce a drive and make it stronger, and satisfying a need does not leave it motivating at the same intensity. Nor is the emerging need something the organisation imposes from outside; it emerges because the lower one has been met.
Apply it. An across-the-board raise produces a short-lived lift, and then people talk about recognition and growth instead. That is prepotency: the need the raise addressed is now fairly well satisfied, so it stopped motivating and the next need took over as the centre of organisation of behaviour.
Do not reach for another theory
The wrong answers to that scenario are all real mechanisms borrowed from other theorists.
- Pay as a hygiene factor is Herzberg, not Maslow.
- Motivation as the product of expectancy, instrumentality and valence is expectancy theory.
- Comparing one's input-outcome ratio with a referent other is equity theory.
Each is a plausible-sounding distractor. If the stem describes a satisfied need losing its pull, the answer is prepotency.
McClelland
David McClelland's The Achieving Society investigates the psychological factors driving economic development, centring on the need for Achievement, which he found appearing in societies before periods of rapid economic growth.
The distractors swap in the need for Affiliation, the need for Power, or a need for Security and attach claims about productivity decline, mature industrial economies, or welfare states. Keep the pairing tight: McClelland, need for Achievement, appearing ahead of rapid growth.