The two-factor theory (also known as Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory and dual-factor theory) states that there are certain factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction while a separate set of factors cause dissatisfaction, all of which act independently of each other. It was developed by psychologistFrederick Herzberg.[1]
Feelings, attitudes and their connection with industrial mental health are related to Abraham Maslow's theory of motivation. His findings have had a considerable theoretical, as well as a practical, influence on attitudes toward administration.[1][2] According to Herzberg, individuals are not content with the satisfaction of lower-order needs at work; for example, those needs associated with minimum salary levels or safe and pleasant working conditions. Rather, individuals look for the gratification of higher-level psychological needs having to do with achievement, recognition, responsibility, advancement, and the nature of the work itself. This appears to parallel Maslow's theory of a need hierarchy. However, Herzberg added a new dimension to this theory by proposing a two-factor model of motivation, based on the notion that the presence of one set of job characteristics or incentives leads to worker satisfaction at work, while another and separate set of job characteristics leads to dissatisfaction at work. Thus, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not on a continuum with one increasing as the other diminishes, but are independent phenomena. This theory suggests that to improve job attitudes and productivity, administrators must recognize and attend to both sets of characteristics and not assume that an increase in satisfaction leads to decrease in dissatisfaction.
The two-factor theory developed from data collected by Herzberg from interviews with 203 engineers and accountants in the Pittsburgh area, chosen because of their professions' growing importance in the business world. Regarding the collection process:
Briefly, we asked our respondents to describe periods in their lives when they were exceedingly happy and unhappy with their jobs. Each respondent gave as many "sequences of events" as he could that met certain criteria— including a marked change in feeling, a beginning, and an end, and contained some substantive description other than feelings and interpretations... The proposed hypothesis appears verified. The factors on the right that led to satisfaction (achievement, intrinsic interest in the work, responsibility, and advancement) are mostly unipolar; that is, they contribute very little to job dissatisfaction. Conversely, the dis-satisfiers (company policy and administrative practices, supervision, interpersonal relationships, working conditions, and salary) contribute very little to job satisfaction.
From analyzing these interviews, he found that job characteristics related to what an individual does — that is, to the nature of the work one performs — apparently have the capacity to gratify such needs as achievement, competency, status, personal worth, and self-realization, thus making him happy and satisfied. However, the absence of such gratifying job characteristics does not appear to lead to unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Instead, dissatisfaction results from unfavorable assessments of such job-related factors as company policies, supervision, technical problems, salary, interpersonal relations on the job, and working conditions. Thus, if management wishes to increase satisfaction on the job, it should be concerned with the nature of the work itself — the opportunities it presents for gaining status, assuming responsibility, and for achieving self-realization. If, on the other hand, management wishes to reduce dissatisfaction, then it must focus on the workplace environment — policies, procedures, supervision, and working conditions.[1] If management is equally concerned with both, then managers must give attention to both sets of job factors.
Two-factor theory distinguishes between:
Motivators (e.g. challenging work, recognition for one's achievement, responsibility, opportunity to do something meaningful, involvement in decision making, sense of importance to an organization) that give positive satisfaction, arising from intrinsic conditions of the job itself, such as recognition, achievement, or personal growth.[4]
Hygiene factors (e.g. status, job security, salary, fringe benefits, work conditions, good pay, paid insurance, vacations) that do not give positive satisfaction or lead to higher motivation, though dissatisfaction results from their absence. The term "hygiene" is used in the sense that these are maintenance factors. These are extrinsic to the work itself, and include aspects such as company policies, supervisory practices, or wages/salary.[4][5] Herzberg often referred to hygiene factors as "KITA" factors, which is an acronym for "kick in the ass", the process of providing incentives or threat of punishment to make someone do something.
According to Herzberg, the absence of hygiene factors causes dissatisfaction among employees in the workplace. However, their presence does not ensure satisfaction entirely. There are several ways that this can be done but some of the most important ways to decrease dissatisfaction would be to pay reasonable wages, ensure employees job security, and to create a positive culture in the workplace. Herzberg considered the following hygiene factors from highest to lowest importance: company policy, supervision, employee's relationship with their boss, work conditions, salary, and relationships with peers.[6] Eliminating dissatisfaction is only one half of the task of the two factor theory. The other half would be to increase satisfaction in the workplace. This can be done by improving on motivating factors. Motivation factors are needed to motivate an employee to higher performance. Herzberg also further classified our actions and how and why we do them, for example, if you perform a work related action because you have to then that is classed as "movement", but if you perform a work related action because you want to then that is classed as "motivation". Herzberg thought it was important to eliminate job dissatisfaction before going onto creating conditions for job satisfaction because it would work against each other. Satisfaction of the employees can have multiple positive effects for the organization. For example, when the employees share their knowledge, they satisfy their social needs and gain cohesion within the group. Also, sharing knowledge helps others to create new knowledge, which also can reinforce the motivating factors.[7] By sharing knowledge, the employees feel satisfied and with the new knowledge it can increase the organizations innovation activities. [8]
According to the two-factor theory, there are four possible combinations:[9]
High hygiene + high motivation: The ideal situation where employees are highly motivated and have few complaints.
High hygiene + low motivation: Employees have few complaints but are not highly motivated. The job is viewed as a paycheck.
Low hygiene + high motivation: Employees are motivated but have a lot of complaints. A situation where the job is exciting and challenging but salaries and work conditions are not up to par.
Low hygiene + low motivation: This is the worst situation where employees are not motivated and have many complaints.
Unlike Maslow, who offered little data to support his ideas, Herzberg and others have presented considerable empirical evidence to confirm the motivation-hygiene theory, although their work has been criticized on methodological grounds.[citation needed]
Workarounds
Herzberg's theory concentrates on the importance of internal job factors as motivating forces for employees. He designed it to increase job enrichment for employees. Herzberg wanted to create the opportunity for employees to take part in planning, performing, and evaluating their work. He suggested to do this by:[4][5][10]
Removing some of the control management has over employees and increasing the accountability and responsibility they have over their work, which would in return increase employee autonomy.
Creating complete and natural work units where it is possible. An example would be allowing employees to create a whole unit or section instead of only allowing them to create part of it.
Providing regular and continuous feedback on productivity and job performance directly to employees instead of through supervisors.
Encouraging employees to take on new and challenging tasks and becoming experts at a task.
In 1968 Herzberg stated that his two-factor theory study had already been replicated 16 times in a wide variety of populations including some in Communist countries, and corroborated with studies using different procedures that agreed with his original findings regarding intrinsic employee motivation making it one of the most widely replicated studies on job attitudes.
One such replication was done by George Hines and published in December 1973 in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Hines tested Herzberg's two-factor motivation theory in New Zealand, using ratings of 12 job factors and overall job satisfaction obtained from 218 middle managers and 196 salaried employees. Contrary to dichotomous motivator-hygiene predictions, supervision and interpersonal relationships were ranked highly by those with high job satisfaction, and there was strong agreement between satisfied managers and salaried employees in the relative importance of job factors. Findings are interpreted in terms of social and employment conditions in New Zealand.[11]
While the Motivator-Hygiene concept is still well regarded, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are generally[who?] no longer considered to exist on separate scales. The separation of satisfaction and dissatisfaction has been shown to be an artifact of the critical incident technique (CIT) used by Herzberg to record events.[12] Furthermore, it has been noted the theory does not allow for individual differences, such as particular personality traits, which would affect individuals' unique responses to motivating or hygiene factors.[4]
A number of behavioral scientists[who?] have pointed to inadequacies in the need for hierarchy and motivation-hygiene theories. The most basic is the criticism that both of these theories contain the relatively explicit assumption that happy and satisfied workers produce more, even though this might not be the case.[citation needed] For example, if playing a better game of golf is the means chosen to satisfy one's need for recognition, then one will find ways to play and think about golf more often, perhaps resulting in a lower output on the job due to a lower amount of focus.[citation needed].
Another problem however is that these and other statistical theories are concerned with explaining "average" behavior, despite considerable differences between individuals that may impact one's motivational factors. For instance, in their pursuit of status a person might take a balanced view and strive to pursue several behavioral paths in an effort to achieve a combination of personal status objectives.[citation needed]
In other words, an individual's expectation or estimated probability that a given behavior will bring a valued outcome determines their choice of means and the effort they will devote to these means. In effect, this diagram of expectancy depicts an employee asking themselves the question posed by one investigator, "How much payoff is there for me toward attaining a personal goal while expending so much effort toward the achievement of an assigned organizational objective?"[13] The expectancy theory by Victor Vroom also provides a framework for motivation based on expectations.
This approach to the study and understanding of motivation would appear to have certain conceptual advantages over other theories: First, unlike Maslow's and Herzberg's theories, it is capable of handling individual differences.[citation needed] Second, its focus is toward the present and the future, in contrast to drive theory, which emphasizes past learning.[citation needed] Third, it specifically correlates behavior to a goal and thus eliminates the problem of assumed relationships, such as between motivation and performance.[citation needed] Fourth, it relates motivation to ability: Performance = Motivation*Ability.[citation needed]
That said, a study by the Gallup Organization, as detailed in the book First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, appears to provide strong support for Herzberg's division of satisfaction and dissatisfaction onto two separate scales. In this book, the authors discuss how the study identified twelve questions that provide a framework for determining high-performing individuals and organizations. These twelve questions align squarely with Herzberg's motivation factors, while hygiene factors were determined to have little effect on motivating high performance.
Related Research Articles
Frederick Irving Herzberg was an American psychologist who became one of the most influential names in business management. He is most famous for introducing job enrichment and the Motivator-Hygiene theory. His 1968 publication "One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees?" had sold 1.2 million reprints by 1987 and was the most requested article from the Harvard Business Review.
Job satisfaction, employee satisfaction or work satisfaction is a measure of workers' contentment with their job, whether they like the job or individual aspects or facets of jobs, such as nature of work or supervision. Job satisfaction can be measured in cognitive (evaluative), affective, and behavioral components. Researchers have also noted that job satisfaction measures vary in the extent to which they measure feelings about the job. or cognitions about the job.
Expectancy theory proposes that an individual will behave or act in a certain way because they are motivated to select a specific behavior over others due to what they expect the result of that selected behavior will be. In essence, the motivation of the behavior selection is determined by the desirability of the outcome. However, at the core of the theory is the cognitive process of how an individual processes the different motivational elements. This is done before making the ultimate choice. The outcome is not the sole determining factor in making the decision of how to behave.
Theory X and Theory Y are theories of human work motivation and management. They were created by Douglas McGregor while he was working at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the 1950s, and developed further in the 1960s. McGregor's work was rooted in motivation theory alongside the works of Abraham Maslow, who created the hierarchy of needs. The two theories proposed by McGregor describe contrasting models of workforce motivation applied by managers in human resource management, organizational behavior, organizational communication and organizational development. Theory X explains the importance of heightened supervision, external rewards, and penalties, while Theory Y highlights the motivating role of job satisfaction and encourages workers to approach tasks without direct supervision. Management use of Theory X and Theory Y can affect employee motivation and productivity in different ways, and managers may choose to implement strategies from both theories into their practices.
Job enrichment is a method of motivating employees where a job is designed to have interesting and challenging tasks which can require more skill and can increase pay.
Content theory is a subset of motivational theories that try to define what motivates people. Content theories of motivation often describe a system of needs that motivate peoples' actions. While process theories of motivation attempt to explain how and why our motivations affect our behaviors, content theories of motivation attempt to define what those motives or needs are. Content theory includes the work of David McClelland, Abraham Maslow and other psychologists.
Organizational behavior or organisational behaviour is the: "study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself". Organizational behavioral research can be categorized in at least three ways:
In industrial and organizational psychology, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is a person's voluntary commitment within an organization or company that is not part of his or her contractual tasks. Organizational citizenship behavior has been studied since the late 1970s. Over the past three decades, interest in these behaviors has increased substantially.
Managerial psychology is a sub-discipline of industrial and organizational psychology that focuses on the effectiveness of individuals and groups in the workplace, using behavioral science.
Quality of working life (QWL) describes a person's broader employment-related experience. Various authors and researchers have proposed models of quality of working life – also referred to as quality of worklife – which include a wide range of factors, sometimes classified as "motivator factors" which if present can make the job experience a positive one, and "hygiene factors" which if lacking are more associated with dissatisfaction. A number of rating scales have been developed aiming to measure overall quality of working life or certain aspects thereof. Some publications have drawn attention to the importance of QWL for both employees and employers, and also for national economic performance.
Despite a large body of positive psychological research into the relationship between happiness and productivity, happiness at work has traditionally been seen as a potential by-product of positive outcomes at work, rather than a pathway to business success. Happiness in the workplace is usually dependent on the work environment. During the past two decades, maintaining a level of happiness at work has become more significant and relevant due to the intensification of work caused by economic uncertainty and increase in competition. Nowadays, happiness is viewed by a growing number of scholars and senior executives as one of the major sources of positive outcomes in the workplace. In fact, companies with higher than average employee happiness exhibit better financial performance and customer satisfaction. It is thus beneficial for companies to create and maintain positive work environments and leadership that will contribute to the happiness of their employees.
Employee retention is the ability of an organization to retain its employees and ensure sustainability. Employee retention can be represented by a simple statistic. Employee retention is also the strategies employers use to try to retain the employees in their workforce.
Positive psychology is defined as a method of building on what is good and what is already working instead of attempting to stimulate improvement by focusing on the weak links in an individual, a group, or in this case, a company. Implementing positive psychology in the workplace means creating an environment that is more enjoyable, productive, and values individual employees. This also means creating a work schedule that does not lead to emotional and physical distress.
Work motivation is a person's internal disposition toward work. To further this, an incentive is the anticipated reward or aversive event available in the environment. While motivation can often be used as a tool to help predict behavior, it varies greatly among individuals and must often be combined with ability and environmental factors to actually influence behavior and performance. Results from a 2012 study, which examined age-related differences in work motivation, suggest a "shift in people's motives" rather than a general decline in motivation with age. That is, it seemed that older employees were less motivated by extrinsically related features of a job, but more by intrinsically rewarding job features. Work motivation is strongly influenced by certain cultural characteristics. Between countries with comparable levels of economic development, collectivist countries tend to have higher levels of work motivation than do countries that tend toward individualism. Similarly measured, higher levels of work motivation can be found in countries that exhibit a long versus a short-term orientation. Also, while national income is not itself a strong predictor of work motivation, indicators that describe a nation's economic strength and stability, such as life expectancy, are. Work motivation decreases as a nation's long-term economic strength increases. Currently work motivation research has explored motivation that may not be consciously driven. This method goal setting is referred to as goal priming. Effects of primed subconscious goals in addition to goals that are consciously set related to job performance have been studied by Stajkovic, Latham, Sergent, and Peterson, who conducted research on a CEO of a for-profit business organization using goal priming to motivate job performance. Goal priming refers to the achievement of a goal by external cues given. These cues can affect information processing and behaviour the pursuit of this goal. In this study, the goal was primed by the CEO using achievement related words strategy placed in emails to employees. This seemingly small gesture alone not only cost the CEO very little money, but it increased objectively measured performance efficiency by 35% and effectiveness by 15% over the course of a 5-day work week. There has been controversy about the true efficacy of this work as to date, only four goal priming experiments have been conducted. However, the results of these studies found support for the hypothesis that primed goals do enhance performance in a for-profit business organization setting.
Employee motivation is an intrinsic and internal drive to put forth the necessary effort and action towards work-related activities. It has been broadly defined as the "psychological forces that determine the direction of a person's behavior in an organisation, a person's level of effort and a person's level of persistence". Also, "Motivation can be thought of as the willingness to expend energy to achieve a goal or a reward. Motivation at work has been defined as 'the sum of the processes that influence the arousal, direction, and maintenance of behaviors relevant to work settings'." Motivated employees are essential to the success of an organization as motivated employees are generally more productive at the work place.
Reward management is concerned with the formulation and implementation of strategies and policies that aim to reward people fairly, equitably and consistently in accordance with their value to the organization.
Public Service Motivation (PSM) is an attribute of government and non-governmental organization (NGO) employment that explains why individuals have a desire to serve the public and link their personal actions with the overall public interest. Understanding the theory and practice of PSM is important in determining the motivations of individuals who choose careers in the government and non-profit sectors despite the potential for more financially lucrative careers in the private sector.
Job characteristics theory is a theory of work design. It provides “a set of implementing principles for enriching jobs in organizational settings”. The original version of job characteristics theory proposed a model of five “core” job characteristics that affect five work-related outcomes through three psychological states.
Employee recognition is the timely, informal or formal acknowledgement of a person's behavior, effort, or business result that supports the organization's goals and values, and exceeds their superior's normal expectations. Recognition has been held to be a constructive response and a judgment made about a person's contribution, reflecting not just work performance but also personal dedication and engagement on a regular or ad hoc basis, and expressed formally or informally, individually or collectively, privately or publicly, and monetarily or non-monetarily.
Employee motivation, also known as work motivation, is a feature of employees that refers to how motivated they are to work. It has a significant impact on employee productivity and efficiency." While motivation is defined as why individuals do or participate in certain behaviors.
References
1 2 3 Herzberg, Frederick; Mausner, Bernard; Snyderman, Barbara B. (1959). The Motivation to Work (2nded.). New York: John Wiley. ISBN0471373893.
↑ Herzberg, Frederick (1966). Work and the Nature of Man. Cleveland: World Publishing. OCLC243610.
↑ Herzberg, Frederick (January–February 1964). "The Motivation-Hygiene Concept and Problems of Manpower". Personnel Administration (27): 3–7.
↑ Shujahat, Muhammad; Ali, Bakhtiar; Nawaz, Faisal; Durst, Susanne; Kianto, Aino (2018). "Translating the impact of knowledge management into knowledge-based innovation: The neglected and mediating role of kwonledge-worker satisfaction". Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing. 32 (1): 200–212. doi:10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7.
↑ Schultz, Duane P.; Schultz, Sydney Ellen (2010). Psychology and Work Today: An Introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology (10thed.). New York City: Prentice Hall. pp.38–39. ISBN978-0-205-68358-1.
↑ Hines, George H. (December 1973). "Cross-cultural differences in two-factor motivation theory". Journal of Applied Psychology. 58 (3): 375–377. doi:10.1037/h0036299.
↑ King, Nathan (1970). "Clarification and Evaluation of the Two-Factor Theory of Job Satisfaction". Psychological Bulletin. 74 (1): 18–31. doi:10.1037/h0029444. OCLC4643874729.
↑ Georgopolous, Basil S.; Mahoney, Gerald M.; Jones, Jr., Nyle W. (December 1957). "A Path-Goal Approach to Productivity". Journal of Applied Psychology. 41 (6): 345–353. doi:10.1037/h0048473. OCLC4643146464.
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