Abraham Maslow: The Concept Of Employee Motivation

The concept of employee motivation is one of modern times. In previous years, people in management positions had one end goal - increase profits. The greater the profits their company was making the better they were doing their job. To achieve greater profits, they focused on improving many aspects of the business. The majority of managers would focus on efficiency and productivity in particular. In their quest to achieve this goal, they would draw as much from their employees as possible while giving as little as possible back in return. Employee’s were viewed as nothing more than subordinates who performed their prescribed duties in return for a pay check. However, as time went by, managers began to realise the importance of motivation in

He was a practitioner of humanistic psychology and is renowned for his creation of the human ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ theory. In the books Motivation and Personality and Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow argued that each person has a hierarchy of needs that must be satisfied in order to achieve motivation and job satisfaction. (A. Maslow Bio n.d.) Frederick Herzberg was born on April 18th, 1923 in Lynn, Massachusetts. He was a psychologist and is best known for creating the ‘Motivator-Hygiene Theory’. His theory suggested that workers were motivated by two sets of factors – Hygiene Factors and Motivation Factors. (Barnaby J. Feder 2000) Both of which he believed needed to be satisfied to achieve maximum job

A striking example of contrasting outlooks between them can be found in the foundation of their theories. For instance, Maslow’s theory is centred around the concept of basic human wants and our need to satisfy them in a hierarchical fashion. He states that individual needs are prioritised and that one must satisfy the first set to move onto the second and so forth. However, in contrast to this, Herzberg refers to his two sets of factors (hygiene and motivating) as ones that need be accomplished, but in no particular order. He recognises both sets of factors are important in achieving employee motivation but that there is no particular order in which they must be fulfilled, as the end goal is to satisfy all