Herzberg's motivation hygiene theory

200 engineers and accountants were asked to recall the times/occasions when they experienced satisfactory and unsatisfactory feeling about their jobs. Later this also involved manual and clerical staff similar results claimed:

Herzberg showed two categories of findings:

Motivators - factors giving rise to satisfaction
Hygiene factors - factors giving rise to dissatisfaction
 

Important Motivators	Important Hygienes
Achievement	Company policy and recognition
Recognition	Supervision - the technical aspects
Work itself	Salary
Responsibility	Interpersonal relations - supervision
Advancement	Working conditions

Other features include:
 

Motivators	Hygiene Factors
related to content of work	related to context/environment of work
promote satisfaction	only prevent dissatisfaction
only neo-human school attempts to address these	Taylor (salary) + Mayo (interpersonal relations) look at these

Advantages

• Herzberg's work led to a practical way to improve motivation, which had, up to that point, been dominated by Taylorism (salary, wages). In particular ' job enrichment' programs mushroomed. The aim of these was to design work and work structures to contain the optimum number of motivators.
• This approach counters the years of Taylorism, which sought to break down work into its simplest components and to remove responsibility from individuals for planning and control.

Disadvantages

• There remain doubts about Herzberg's factors applicability to non-professional groups, despite the fact that some of his later studies involved the clerical and manual groups. The numbers were in these categories though were small and many researchers still argue about the results in these groups.
• Social scientists argue about the validity of his definition of 'job satisfaction'