Herzberg's Theory Of Employee Motivation

Employee motivation is, or at least must be, one of the key issues for directors, managers and personnel managers. The leader must be able to find the sensitive strings of his subordinates, which can be motivated by influencing them to achieve high performance. The correct use of motivation encourages staff to make more efficient use of their knowledge, skills, and talents. In today's turbulent, often chaotic environment, commercial success depends on the employee's talent and effort. Despite the many existing theories and practices, some of the motivation of leaders today remains a mystical term. This is partly due to the fact that people are motivated by different things and techniques.

Motivation is derived from an internal force that provides an individual the opportunity to achieve their needs or goals. People are motivated by a variety of things and often have different motivating factors. Employers should be mindful of individual motivating factors when attempting to motivate staff to increase performance. While some people may be motivated by money, many are motivated by things like: recognition, promotion, and increased responsibility. Once an employer has identified motivating factors they are able to analyze a variety of motivational theories to design and implement a program that will motivate employees to go above and beyond what is expected of them.

Mitchell (1982, p.82) describes motivation as “the degree to which an individual wants and chooses to engage in certain specified behaviours”. Hence, in general, behaviour is determined by certain motives, thus, Vroom and Deci (1992, p.33) considered motivation “as the causes of our behaviour”. Moreover, according to Mullins (2013, p.245) motivation is concerned with question “why do people do what they do?”, because motivation is an inner driving force which leads to particular action to achieve some aim and fulfil some need. In other words, Chartered Management Institute (cited in Mullins, 2013, p.246) observes that, “the aim of management is to give people what they really want most from work”.

The success of any business depends on the productivity and satisfaction of its employees. Employees need to be motivated to work. Motivation can be defined as the inner force that drives individuals to accomplish personal and organizational goals. Motivation can be either intrinsic or extrinsic. For an individual to be motivated in a work situation there must be a need, which the individual would have to perceive a possibility of satisfying through some reward. Intrinsic motivation stems from motivations that are inherent and arise from performing the task of the job itself, which the individual gets a feeling of either positive or negative motivation as a result of

According to Herzberg, individuals are not satisfied with lower-order needs at work, for example, those associated with minimum salary levels or safe and pleasant working conditions. Theses individuals look for the gratification of higher-level psychological needs such as achievement, recognition, responsibility, advancement, and the nature of the work itself. Motivation-hygiene theory, based on the presence of one set of job characteristics or incentives lead to worker satisfaction at work, while another and separate set of job characteristics lead to dissatisfaction at work. Moreover he found that job characteristics related to what an individual does is the nature of the work he performs, having the capacity to gratify such needs such as achievement, competency, status, personal worth, and self-realization, leading to satisfaction. However, the absence of such gratifying job characteristics does not lead to dissatisfaction. Instead, dissatisfaction results from unfavorable assessments of such job-related factors as company

Motivation in the workplace is one of the major concerns that managers face when trying to encourage their employees to work harder and do what is expected of them on a day-to-day basis. According to Organizational Behavior by John R. Schermerhorn, James G. Hunt and Richard N. Osborn the definition of motivation is "the individual forces that account for the direction, level, and persistence of a person's effort expended at work." They go on to say that "motivation is a key concern in firms across the globe." Through the years there have been several theories as to what motivates employees to do their best at work. In order to better understand these theories we will apply them to a fictitious organization that has the following

Motivation is central to understanding behavior in organizations and a key managerial factor. Two aspects of motivation are structuring tasks to satisfy worker and organizational needs and providing the proper direction for worker actions (Stroh, Northcraft and Neale, 2002). There are a number of factors when it comes to the difference in worker performance. One of these factors is related to different levels of ability

(1959). 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. (Figure 1) 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 unpleasurable dissatisfaction. Herzberg concluded that these factors not only cause job satisfaction, but to have a positive and lasting influence on motivation, if they are present. Therefore these factors became known as “motivators”. Dissatisfaction on the other hand was caused by factors in the job environment that did not directly contribute to the work itself, Herzberg, Mausner, Boch Snyderman (1959). The positive handling of these factors, according to Herzberg, could have only a short-term effect on motivation, while these factors caused severe dissatisfaction with the job, if they were handled badly. Herzberg referred to these factors as “hygiene”.

Moreover, Vroom affirms that a worker’s knowledge and experience significantly influence their productivity. He adds that achievement and effort are connected to a person’s motivation. In such a way, workers set goals and can be motivated if they expect that there is a positive link between efforts and performance. They anticipate that hard work results in a captivating reward and that compensation satisfies a critical need, as the following variables describe.

Motivation is an important thing in our life. without motivation no one can live because it helps anyone to achieve his goals for example if a person in the school or college study to get a good mark in the exam so if his parent motivates him he will spend more hours to study to the exam and he will not only get a good mark but he will get a full mark. So motivation help everyone to study or work hard to achieve his goal. Motivation is the characteristic that helps to achieve the goals of a person and it is the energy that keep everyone going even when they fall. There are many theories for motivation there is two that is good to talk about it.

From a five-year research program by The Buhl Foundation on job attitudes, resulting the two-factor theory of job satisfaction. After Herzberg and his colleagues conducted a comprehensive literature review,

Motivation as a term has been derived from the Latin word “movere”, meaning to move. Motivation aims to those psychological processes that can cause the arousal, direction, and persistence of voluntary actions that are oriented towards a common goal. Motivation is the “willingness to exercise higher levels of effort toward organizational goals, backed by the effort’s ability to satisfy most of the individual needs”. Needs here are internal states that makes some outcomes attractive. Unsatisfied needs create anxiety that stimulates drives within the individual. These drives then triggers search behaviour to look for particular goals that, if accomplished, will satisfy the needs and lead to the reduction in anxiety. This concludes

Motivation acts a force to energize and direct behavior in the workplace (Myers 329) so that employees perform tasks to a high degree. It is motivation that retains employees in a company because improper motivation acts as a deterrent to productivity and joy. Whether physiological, emotional, or incentive based, motivation affects our lives everyday and induces our natural drive to thrive and succeed. Many psychological theories explain the different ways employees may become motivated, such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Herzberg’s two factor theory, and theory Y, based on how appealing a stimuli may be to an employee’s needs.

According to Herzberg, the factors leading to job satisfaction are distinctly different from those that lead to job-dissatisfaction. Therefore, the managers who seek to eliminate factors that create job-dissatisfaction can bring about peace at the workplace but cannot motivate the employees. These factors are termed as hygiene factors comprising administration, supervision, working conditions, salary and wages etc. While absence of hygiene factors will lead to dissatisfaction, mere presence of these factors will not satisfy (i.e. motivate) the employees. In order to motivate the employees, managers must resort to ‘motivators’ (those factors that motivate the employees towards better performance) such as recognition, challenging assignment, responsibility, opportunities for growth and self-fulfillment etc.

One of the first authors that dealt with the sources of motivation was Frederick Taylor who focussed on the overall productivity of an organisation. He linked this productivity to the effort an employee puts into their work which in turn is dependent on monetary rewards (Taylor, 1911). This theory was established in the context of the industrial age and thus is outdated for today’s analysis but it still provides a basic assumption which is often referred to by other authors. The total neglecting of a worker’s intrinsic motivators is a starting point for discussion for authors that conducted research in that area after Taylor.