I have yet to be in a situation where any of these things are presented to me as scientific fact. As Mark says above, they are usually approaches for thinking about things. It sounds like you are being wound up by the way they have been presented to you by lazy trainers using them to prove a point and have redirected this at the systems themselves. I doubt Maslow ever thought that these things were only possible in the exact order he specified and that people weren't individuals, but the basic premise remains that you can spend all the time you like trying to look after employees' welfare through fun and creativity but if you haven't got the basics right like security in their role, enough time off to sleep properly and access to proper catering, then no one is going to welcome your happy clappy self actualisation team building and you need to focus on the basics first. I wish that someone had shown the diagram in your example above to some organisations I have worked for and explained how misdirected their 'employee support' was. Systems and diagrams help, I don't think it's a crime to use them as long as you recognise they are a system. I could TM the 'to do' list and peddle it like a quack trainer but it wouldn't mean that it wasn't an effective system.