Hersberg's motivation-hygiene theory

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 405.

motivators –achievement, challenging work, the work itself, career prospects,

responsibility, recognition.

hygiene factors –company policy and administration, salary and fringe benefits,

quality of supervision, relationships with colleagues, job security,

status, personal life, work conditions.

Hygiene factors are essential if workers are to be motivated. They mostly deal with the question: ”Why work here?” The motivators deal with the question: ”Why work harder?”.

If Herzberg theory is true, it means that managers must pay great attention to job content. Even with the development of computers and robotics, there are and always will be plenty of boring, mindless, repetitive and mechanical jobs in all sectors of the economy, and lots of unskilled people who have to do them. So managers must find ways of making jobs more challenging and interesting.

One solution is to give people some responsibilities, not as individuals but as part of a team. For example, some supermarkets combine office staff, the people who fill the shelves, and the people who work on the checkout tills into a team and let them decide what product lines to stock, how to display them, and so on. Other employers ensure that people in repetitive jobs change them every couple of hours, as doing four different repetitive jobs a day is better than doing only one.

Sweden has been leading in motivating people. At one car plant, for example, Volvo workers assemble the whole of a car rather than do a few simple operations. In a glass factory, production workers have complete control over the work process in the grinding and polishing department. Other workers have helped to build and design paper mills.

Many people now talk about the importance of a company's shared values or corporate culture, with which all the staff can identify: for example, being the best hotel chain, or hamburger restaurant chain, or airline, or making the best, the safest, the most user-friendly, the most ecological or the most reliable products in a particular field.