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Motivation Hygiene Theory – Frederick Hertzberg; 1959 (Content Theory)
What is the Theory?
What do people want from their jobs? Do they just want a higher salary? Or do they want security,
good relationships with co-workers, opportunities for growth and advancement – or something else
altogether?
This is an important question, because it's at the root of motivation - the art of engaging with members
of your team in such a way that they give their very best performance.
The psychologist Fredrick Herzberg asked the same question in the 1950s and 60s as a means of
understanding employee satisfaction. He set out to determine the effect of attitude on motivation, by
asking people to describe situations where they felt really good, and really bad, about their jobs. What
he found was that people who felt good about their jobs gave very different responses from the people
who felt bad.
These results form the basis of Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory (sometimes known as
Herzberg's Two Factor Theory). Published in his famous article, "One More Time: How do You Motivate
Employees," the conclusions he drew were extraordinarily influential, and still form the bedrock of
good motivational practice nearly half a century later.
Herzberg's findings revealed that certain characteristics of a job are consistently related to job
satisfaction (also known as ‘Motivating’ Factors), while different factors are associated with job
dissatisfaction (also known as ‘Hygiene’ Factors). These include:
Factors Leading to Dissatisfaction (Hygiene)
Factors Leading to Satisfaction (Motivators)
Company policy, procedures & admin
Sense of personal achievement
Quality of Supervision
Recognition
Relationships with managers and peers
Challenging/Stimulating work
Working conditions
Responsibility
Salary, wages and other benefits
Opportunity for Advancement
Job security
Promotion
Work/life balance
Personal growth
The conclusion he drew however, is that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not opposites.
So remedying the causes of dissatisfaction will not create satisfaction. Nor will adding the factors of
job satisfaction eliminate job dissatisfaction. If you have a hostile work environment for example,
giving someone a promotion will not make him or her satisfied. If you create a healthy work
environment but do not provide members of your team with any of the satisfaction factors, the work
they're doing will still not be satisfying.
Hertzberg’s theory therefore would promote a two stage process to motivating people at work in
practice. Firstly, you need to eliminate the dissatisfaction they're experiencing and, secondly, you
need to help them find satisfaction.
Extracts taken from https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/herzberg-motivators-hygiene-factors.htm
