Frederick Herzberg had a year-old schnauzer. When it was a puppy and he wanted it to move, he kicked it in the rear, and it moved.
Then he finished its obedience training. Now, when he wanted the dog to move, he held up a dog biscuit, and the dog came. Herzberg said that when he asked managers whether a reward like that counted as motivation, the overwhelming answer was yes.
He told the story in the Harvard Business Review in 1968, and turned it into a question for his readers. In this instance, who is motivated, I or the dog?
“The dog wants the biscuit, but it is I who want it to move. Again, I am the one who is motivated, and the dog is the one who moves.”
Movement, not motivation
Herzberg had one name for the kick and the biscuit. He called them KITA, short for a kick in the pants. A reward offered in exchange for doing what you’re told was, to him, KITA applied from the front: a pull instead of a push.
His complaint was that KITA works only while you keep applying it. Kick the dog and it moves. When you want it to move again, you have to kick it again. “I can charge a person’s battery, and then recharge it, and recharge it again,” he wrote. “But it is only when one has a generator of one’s own that we can talk about motivation.”
He went down the list of things companies had tried, from shorter hours and fringe benefits to courses in human relations. Had spiraling wages motivated people? “Yes, to seek the next wage increase.”
For the generator, he went back to what workers themselves had told him.
The best day and the worst day
The research began with engineers and accountants. Herzberg and his colleagues collected their accounts of real events at work that had made them feel good or bad about the job. The results became a 1959 book, The Motivation to Work, written with Bernard Mausner and Barbara Bloch Snyderman.
In his data, the good stories and the bad stories were mostly about different things. By 1968 Herzberg could pool 12 investigations covering 1,685 employees, from nurses and food handlers to military officers and Hungarian engineers. Of the factors behind the best moments, 81% were what he called motivators: achievement, recognition for achievement, the work itself, responsibility, and growth. Of the factors behind the worst, 69% were what he called hygiene: company policy, supervision, relations with colleagues, working conditions, salary, status and security.
The word fits. Clean water and mopped wards keep a hospital from making people sick. Nobody walks out fitter because the floor was clean.
So in his view satisfaction and dissatisfaction were not two ends of one scale. “The opposite of job dissatisfaction is not job satisfaction, but no job dissatisfaction.”
The opposite of miserable at work isn’t motivated. It’s just not miserable.
Fix the leaking roof, the petty rules and the unfair pay, and you remove reasons to be unhappy. In Herzberg’s account, that alone gives nobody a reason to try.
The case against
Plenty of researchers thought this was too neat. When a 1967 study had people in six occupations sort statements about good and bad jobs, satisfaction and dissatisfaction could each come from the work itself, from its surroundings, or from both, and achievement and recognition weighed on the bad days as well as the good ones. Its authors called the theory “a grossly oversimplified portrayal.” Others still defend its core, and a 2007 review summed it up as “a popular but controversial theory.” The two lists are not as cleanly separate as Herzberg drew them. His question to every perk and pay rise is the part still worth asking: does it make the job less bad, or does it make the job worth doing?
The raise that changed nothing
Say an accountant’s raise finally comes through. She argued for it for months, and it was fair. She feels relieved, a little vindicated, and her biggest complaint about the job is gone.
Then she opens the next file. Her manager still reads every report before it goes out and signs it under his own name. Nobody has asked what she thinks of the client. The work on her desk is exactly what it was this morning. She is just paid more to do it.
By Herzberg’s logic, the raise did its job. It removed a reason to be unhappy. It was never going to give her a reason to care.
In one experiment he described, a very large company changed the work instead of the pay. Correspondents who answered shareholders’ letters began signing their own names, where a supervisor had signed every letter before. Checks on the experienced writers dropped from every letter to one in ten. Performance dipped at first. After six months, that group was outperforming a comparison group and liked its work more. That approach has its own page, Job Enrichment.
The raise settled one complaint. The name at the bottom of her report is still his.