Frederick Herzberg's Two Factor Concept

For decades, motivation of an employee has been amongst key concerns of management team of any organization. Why it should not be? The success of any organization is guided by the employee’s performance, commitment, loyalty etc. and the best way to ensure all these is motivation. If employees are highly motivated then efficiency & productivity of the organization automatically increases. In fact, a study suggests that most employees can sustain their jobs by working at 25% of their capacity. However, if the same employees are motivated in a way that they are working for some reason, they achieve 85-90% of their ability (Hersey and Blanchard, 1988). Keeping this in mind, organization should seek to create an environment in workplace which enrich the life of those who work (Davidmann, 1989) and employee like working in that environment

The most well-known theories of motivation

It was originally published by the Harvard Business Review in 1968 and thereafter republished in the 1991 edition, First, Herzberg wrote that short-term stimulators (decreasing hours; increasing salaries and benefits) should be avoided as they end up becoming only outside pushes. Anything that is a push is not viewed as a remuneration by the employee; rather, it is considered a right.

Herzberg developed a dual way to explain motivation: satisfiers, which come from the employees’ ability to achieve and grow, and dis-satisfiers, which come from their animal nature. He stressed that satisfiers and dis-satisfiers are distinct from one another. He did not advocate a continuum of needs as did by Maslow. Instead, he proposed that managers must first deal with satisfiers and then deal with dis-satisfiers separately. Dis-satisfiers must be eliminated before the satisfiers are implemented in the workplace, otherwise workers overlook the satisfiers.

Included under each category