Effective management of human resources in any organization includes providing an environment that is conducive to the satisfaction of basic needs in the workplace. This concept has been increasingly embraced by business and industry and to a lesser extent in academia. One group considered vital to higher education, whose needs have been ignored, are academic department chairpersons. The perceived needs fulfillment of 114 department chairpersons at 13 four-year colleges in Puerto Rico was examined, as was the relationship of those perceptions to selected demographic factors and to four organization environmental characteristics that relate to whether the institution is public or private. An important finding was that unlike "middle managers" in non-academic settings, the department chairpersons perceived their least fulfilled need to be security, the lowest level of need according to Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs. Significant differences were also found between the perceptions of department chairs in private and public colleges regarding such environmental characteristics as collegiality and participation in decision-making. The implications of these findings for effective institutional goal achievement are addressed. Contains 44 references. (Author/KM)