Motivation to Work

Frederick Herzberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351504423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Quality work that fosters job satisfaction and health enjoys top priority in industry all over the world. This was not always so. Until recently analysis of job attitudes focused primarily on human relations problems within organizations. While American industry was trying to solve the unsolvable problem of avoiding interpersonal dissatisfaction, problems with the potential for solution, such as training and quality production, were ignored. When first published, 'The Motivation to Work' challenged the received wisdom by showing that worker fulfillment came from achievement and growth within the job itself. In his new introduction, Herzberg examines thirty years of motivational research in job-related areas. Based on workers' accounts of real events that have made them feel good or bad on the job, the findings of Herzberg and his colleagues have stimulated research and controversy that continue to the present day. The authors surprisingly found that while a poor work environment generated discontent, improved conditions seldom brought about improved attitudes. Instead, satisfaction came most often from factors intrinsic to work: achievements, job recognition, and work that was challenging, interesting, and responsible. The evidence marshaled by this volume called into question many previous assumptions about job satisfaction and worker motivation. Feelings about intrinsic and extrinsic factors could not be validly averaged on a single scale of measurement. Motivation and performance are not merely dependent upon environmental needs and external rewards. Frederick Herzberg and his staff based their motivation—hygiene theory on a variety of human needs and applied it to a strategy of job enrichment that has widely influenced motivation and job design strategies. 'Motivation to Work' is a landmark volume that is of enduring interest to sociologists, psychologists, labor studies specialists, and organization analysts.

Part I ∙ Background and Procedure

Chapter 1 Origins of the Study

This is a book about people at work. More precisely, it is about their attitudes toward their jobs. Work is one of the most absorbing-things men can think and talk about. It fills the greater part of the waking day for most of us. For the fortunate it is the source of great satisfactions; for many others it is the cause of grief.

People talk about work in many ways. Men who work together spin shop talk interminably. Sometimes this is idle gossip about personalities and conditions. "Jim can't handle his promotion, and if he doesn't watch out he will skid all the way." "Sam is the man to go to if you want to get around all the red tape." "The air conditioning didn't work today; it was hot as blazes." "They better pay some attention to safety around here or before long someone is going to get killed."

Sometimes it is the rich interchange of experiences and the examination of problems of mutual concern. How do you work for a man who can't delegate? How can we cut down on absenteeism when the work force is made up of women secondary-wage earners? Do you really think they are going to put in automatic controls and knock out all the jobs on the line?

When people who know each other well and see each other often talk about their work, feelings about the job as a whole come out tangentially. We don't have to tell our friends whether we are happy or unhappy; the nature of our feelings emerges from the welter of details. It can be inferred from the composite picture of anecdotes, passing comments, and feeling tones.

The straightforward question "How do you like your job?" is asked directly when old friends meet after long separation. Then people stop and weigh the circumstances, the demands of candor, and the need to add pluses and minuses to arrive at a total assessment. One man might say,

Yes, on the whole I like what I'm doing. Teaching school isn't a bad way of making a living, if you call it a living. I like the excitement of watching the kids grow; at least, the ones that do. I like knowing what I'll be doing fifteen years from now, although I gripe about how little I will be making.

Another might say,

I manage. The work is easy; the men I work with are a nice bunch. I'm not getting anywhere, but at least I have twelve years of seniority, and last year when production went down to 65 per cent they let thirty-five men go in my department but kept me on. I used to think there wasn't anything to living if you couldn't believe that someday you would make something of yourself. Not now. I get my kicks out of my boat.

Or worse yet,

I feel stifled. The section head is always looking over my shoulder. I can't turn around but he is picking faults. I had five drawings rejected last month, and I know other men get by with a lot less. It's this recession and I can't move now. But when things pick up I'll be out in no time flat. Meanwhile, I don't knock myself out. I do an adequate job, but you can't put your heart in it when you know you're just waiting for a chance to leave.

It is the wife, however, who gets filled in on the details of these general assessments of job attitudes. She hears about what happened at the office.

I was making a vital long distance call, even though it was against regulations. The division is woefully understaffed and I made the call in a desperate effort to get caught up on the work. My boss caught me and ripped the phone right out of my hand. I was provoked to the point at which I had to walk away. All day I found it hard to concentrate; my blood pressure is up and I'm so jumpy. First chance I get I'm leaving.

Or more chronically,

I've been assigned nothing but tables and side arms to design since I showed that I can do these satisfactorily. I have no chance to show what I can really do and have no opportunities to learn. I'm nothing more than a number to the company which takes me for granted. My work has become sloppy and change slips are coming in.

A more fortunate wife finds her husband returning home after a day's sick leave looking better than she has seen him look for years.

You know the company is making heavy layoffs now. When I came in this morning the chief engineer asked me if I had been looking for another job while I was out. He said, "Don't ever go looking for a job; I'll lay every man off before I let you go. You handle five times as much as any other man in this department." I hated to leave the office today.

This is the raw material of experience, the stuff of job attitudes. The scientist who wishes to study people's feelings about their work has to do more than collect experiences. His investigation must focus on specific questions. Three simple questions are implicit in the stories with which we opened this chapter. The first of these is how can you specify the attitude of any individual toward his job? The second is, what leads to these attitudes? The third is, what are the consequences of these attitudes?

An essential preliminary to a fresh approach to the study of job attitudes was detailed knowledge of what had been done and thought in this field. Fortunately, we had previously carried out an intensive survey, the results of which were available to us (23). This section attempts to summarize briefly only those aspects of the literature that are relevant to the design of the study we carried out. It also traces the steps that led to a formulation of the approach used in this study.

The Measurement of Job Attitudes

There is a great variety of measures of job attitudes. Basically, however, the identification of job attitudes has been done in three ways. In the first of these the worker is asked to express his "job satisfaction" directly by answering questions that investigate his over-all attitude toward his job, whether he likes or dislikes it. A good example is the work of Hoppock (25). The primary usefulness of this approach is in the investigation of demographic variables. Thus one can, in a simple way, compare the morale or job satisfaction of workers differing in age, sex, educational level, social class, occupational character, or position in a hierarchy. It was apparent to many investigators that a worker could be asked not only to express his over-all attitude toward his job but also to evaluate his feelings about the many specific aspects of his work. Thus, in a second approach, scaled inventories of morale or job attitudes were considered. These inventories are predicated on the assumption that it is possible to summate many specific attitudinal responses and to arrive at an over-all score that expresses the worker's morale. The well-known inventory developed by Science Research Associates (53), which has been given in one form or another to many hundreds of thousands of workers, is an example of this method. As in the first approach, the scores on scaled inventories can be used for demographic studies. In addition, an analysis of the parts of such an inventory by various statistical techniques makes it possible to investigate the specific components of morale.

In the third approach no specific measure of morale is taken, A psychologist observes the behavior of workers. He infers attitudes, feelings, and motives from the behavior he observes. Typical of this approach is the classical Hawthorne study (51), which deals with the effects of group pressures of various forms and of supervisory behavior on the worker. There have been many succeeding investigations by social psychologists and industrial sociologists into group factors in industry. Like the Hawthorne study, they arrive at an evaluation of morale from the direct study of group behavior.

Factors in Job Attitudes

One of the major reasons for measuring morale is to answer the question, "What does the worker want from his job?" Answers to this question are important to industry in that they offer a clue to management in the never-ending hunt for ways of motivating workers. They are also of interest to the behavioral scientist in his study of environmental factors as causative agents in behavior. There are three distinct ways of developing these answers: (1) An a priori list of factors can be presented to workers, who are then asked to rank or rate these factors as to desirability. Examples are wages, supervision, company and management policies, and communication. (2) Workers can be asked to indicate spontaneously what they like or dislike about their jobs. An analysis of these comments would reveal the existence of some of the factors listed. Their relative importance can be deduced either from the frequency with which they are given by the workers or by some method of weighting the vigor of the like or dislike. (3) Multiple-item inventories or questionnaires may be administered. These make it possible to apply statistical techniques of analysis. From such an analysis it is possible to derive factors whose content can be deduced from a study of the interrelationships among the items. These factors have often been found to be essentially similar to those derived from the first two techniques.

As a result of an enormous amount of activity along the lines described, various lists of factors have been developed. These lists are basically similar but vary somewhat, depending on the source of the information and on the technique that was used to elicit it. In more subtle analyses it is often possible to do a demographic study of variations in the order of importance of various factors. Thus one can note differences in the kind of things desired from a job by company workers at higher or lower levels, older and younger workers, men or women. Unfortunately, the stability of these findings is relatively slight (23,Chapter 3). The one dramatic finding that emerged in our review of this literature was the fact that there was a difference in the primacy of factors, depending upon whether the investigator was looking for things the worker liked about his job or things he disliked. The concept that there were some factors that were "satisfiers" and others that were "dissatisfiers" was suggested by this finding. From it was derived one of the basic hypotheses of our own study.

Studies of the Effects of Job Attitudes

A demonstration of the relationship between measures of attitudes and resulting behavior is of the first importance. Industry wants to know whether the worker's attitude toward his job makes any difference in the way he works or in his willingness to stick with it. The behavioral scientist wants to know whether the measures of job attitudes have any predictive power. Unfortunately, it is difficult to evaluate the bulk of this research, since it consists of correlational studies in which comparison is made between groups of high or low morale, high or low productivity, or high or low turnover. There is a discussion of correlational studies at a later point in this chapter.

The conclusion from our survey of the literature of correlational studies was that there probably is some relationship between job attitudes and output or productivity. Unfortunately, the studies in which this relationship has been demonstrated are far from consistent. In fact, a well-known survey of the literature carried out independently of ours by Brayfield and Crockett (8) came to the firm conclusion that there is no relationship between job attitudes and performance on the job. The difference between their conclusion and ours was due to their greater scepticism of studies in which low, but positive, correlations were reported and to our citation of a number of studies with such low positive findings not included by them. Certainly there is no basic disagreement as to the tenuous nature of the relationship as it has been so far demonstrated. More uniform relationships between the worker's attitudes and absenteeism, turnover, and personal adjustment were evident in the literature we reviewed (23, Chapter 4).

Theory

The degree to which studies in job attitudes have been made a basis for fruitful theorizing is disappointing. We found relatively few places in which experimental or other investigations of people's attitudes toward their jobs had been integrated into the general body of psychology. There were even fewer in which psychological theory was used as a starting point for these investigations. Of course, there are some exceptions.

One of the most important is to be found in the pioneering work of Elton Mayo and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School. In one sense the famous Hawthorne studies (42, 51), carried out by this group, are not theoretically oriented at all. They call very little on the formal theoretical systems of any of the social sciences. In another sense, however, they are real contributions to theory. The discovery that the relationships between workers and their supervisors lead to a more potent influence on output than any manipulation of environmental conditions and that the informal associations of a group of men at work act as a potent stabilizer on the level of production (the notion of the informal group enforcing-its notion of the "fair day's work") were made the basis of a new frame of reference in industry. To the extent to which this new approach, signified by the somewhat shopworn phrase "human relations," has led to fruitful research and to changes in industrial practice, this approach has fulfilled the function of theory.

The application of formal sociological and psychological theory to the analysis of people's attitudes toward their jobs has, as far as we can tell, been limited to the study of social groups. The theories of Kurt Lewin (35, 36) in psychology and of Malinowski (38), Hughes (27), and Romans (24), among others, in sociology have led to a thorough cultivation of the study of work groups. We refer in some detail to a number of these investigations at later occasions. At this point we should note that this body of work is only tangentially relevant to our own investigation. The studies that derive from it contain few direct approaches to people's attitudes. Typically, they focus on the group as the unit of investigation. The individual plays a role primarily in terms of his position in the structure of the group or his contribution to group processes.

Within this framework some useful concepts have been developed. First, a group can be viewed as having structure or form. This structure is dependent on the nature of communication among its members and also on the lines of influence or authority. An individual's attitudes toward his work can certainly be affected by his position within the structure of a group and by the nature of that structure itself (5). Secondly, a group can be considered as loosely or tightly pulled together. It can be demonstrated that the degree of attraction of its members to the group, its cohesiveness, can affect the group's ability to control the behavior of its members; this can lead to increased production when the group accepts production as its own goal and severely curtail production when it fails to do so (52). Third, a group has direction, and this direction is usually given by a leader (23, Chapter 5). The effect of variations in the nature of leadership on an individual's attitudes toward his work is far from clear. Although earlier studies led to the conclusion that "autocratic" leadership was inferior to "democratic" leadership in terms of the group's morale as well as productivity (29), later work seems to qualify this seriously. In one of the rare studies in which the nature of supervision in work groups was systematically varied, autocratic leadership seemed to lead to improved output, despite its deleterious effects on morale (46).

This current of research led to the notion that employees who are given the opportunity to play a role in the setting of goals and the making of decisions affecting their work will accept change more readily than those who are catapulted into change without any opportunity for the exercise of free choice (11). The notion of the value of "participation" is one that we utilize in the interpretation of our own findings.

One of the most important sets of concepts to be found in the body of literature on the industrial work group is that of "employee-centered supervision." Starting with the findings of the Hawthorne study, and taking strength from the conclusions of the research we have just cited, the idea has grown that a supervisor is successful to the degree to which he focuses on the needs of his subordinate...