F. Herzberg, 'Management Review, 1971, pp. 2-5.

An Interview with Frederick Herzberg: Managers or Animal Trainers?

[The initials 'MR.' stand for Management Review, the interviewer.]

MR:

Maybe the best place to start is with the title of your Harvard Business Review article, 'One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?'

Herzberg:

Historically, we have to begin with a grant I received to investigate the whole area of job attitudes when I was at Psychological Services in Pittsburgh...  I was interested in aspects of mental health, which certainly included job attitudes. The first stage of this research program, obviously, was to review the literature. We had a bibliography of 3,000 books and articles. The result was a book called Job Attitudes: Review of Research and Opinion...  However, when we had finished Job Attitudes: Review of Research and Opinion we could make no sense out of it.

It seemed that the human being was forever debarred from rational understanding as to why he worked.

We... noticed that there was a hint that the things people said positively about their job experiences were not the opposite of what they said negatively about their job experiences; the reverse of the factors that seemed to make people happy in jobs did not make them unhappy. So what happens in science, when your research leads to ambiguity? You begin to suspect your premises....

MR:

That was your core insight?

Herzberg:

That was the core insight. I said, perhaps we're talking about two different modalities. Job satisfaction, let's use that term, and job dissatisfaction are not opposites; they are completely separate continua, like hearing and vision. If this is true, if we recognize that they are separate continua, then they must be produced by different factors and have their own dynamics...

Then I said, O.K., let's test this idea. Obviously, what had to be done was to find out what made people happy separately from finding out what made people unhappy. And you couldn't just ask people, 'What do you like about your job?' That's like asking, 'How do you feel?'--a nonsensical question. In fact, two questions must be asked: What makes you happy on the job? And, equally important, What makes you unhappy on the job?

MR:

Your methodology was different, too, as I recall.

Herzberg:

Yes, people respond for the sake of responding. And they tend to give the answers that will win the approval of the people asking the questions...

Instead of asking people what makes them happy or unhappy, I thought it would be better to get at the kinds of experiences that produced satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a job. By doing these two things -- by asking two questions where one was usually asked and by obtaining my data from analysis of the kinds of experiences people had rather than what they say makes them happy or unhappy found that the two systems existed.

With the appearance of the two systems, my thinking that what makes people happy and what makes people unhappy were not the same things was verified.

In analyzing the commonalities among the factors that make people definitely unhappy or definitely happy, I found that the factors which make people happy all are related to what people did: the job content.

Contrariwise, I found that what made people unhappy was related to the situation in which they did their job: job environment, job context -- what I called hygiene factors. So now you have a finding that makes much more sense. What makes people happy is what they do or the way they're utilized, and what makes people unhappy is the way they're treated. That pretty much summarizes my second book, The Motivation to Work.

MR:

Then in your third book, Work and the Nature of Man, you searched for the psychological underpinnings for your theory.

Herzberg:

Why does job content make people happy? ...

Further research and experience suggested what makes people unhappy is pain from the environment.

We have this in common with all animals. We're all trying to adjust to the environment -- to avoid pain. On the other hand, man is also different from an animal and what makes him different is that he is a determiner, whereas the animal is always determined...

So I developed the Adam and Abraham concept, the two natures of man.

As Adam, he's an animal, and as an animal he tries to avoid pain from the environment as all animals do.

As Abraham, he's a human being, and as a human being he's not the opposite of an animal, he's qualitatively different. His dynamic is to manifest his talents, and the only way he can manifest his talents is by doing things that allow him to develop his potential...

In summary, you had a three-step sequence. First, what we knew about job attitudes from the past made no sense, so we had to look at the problem differently. Second, when the problem was redefined, a very different research result was obtained. Third, I had to explain the research results. Now I have a theory, documented with research and supported by an understanding of why the theory worked....

MR:

How do you apply the theory? That was also the subject of the last chapter in Work and the Nature of Man.

Herzberg:

[The aricle] 'One More Time' does two things. First, it suggests that you can get people to do things as Adam, and you can get people to do things as human beings -- but the ways you get them to do things are very different.

To get people to do things as animals, you move them. When I respond as an animal because I want to avoid being hurt, that's movement. I called it KITA, for 'kick in the ass.'

When a human being does something, he's motivated. The initiative comes from within.

Further, I showed how the various techniques of human relations are just different forms of positive and negative KITA.

Second, I went on to demonstrate the difference between management by movement and management by motivation or job enrichment. How, by changing what people do, you motivate them to do better work...

Most of my work now consists of looking at the total problem of mankind living in society through motivation-hygiene theory. Not only must we reorient our management thinking in terms of how you motivate people, but how we apply the same theory to develop a sane society...

That pretty much summarizes motivation-hygiene theory, what it is, how it came to be, and where it is going.