Frederick Herzberg (1923 - 2000) was a contemporary of Abraham Maslow. While Maslow dealt about the rank and satisfaction of various human needs and how people pursue these needs, Herzberg, a psychologist, proposed a theory about job factors that motivate employees.

During the 50's and 60's Fredrick Herzberg studied the key factors inflencing a worker's performance. During his research, he found that certain factors tended to cause a worker to feel unsatisfied with his or her job. He developed a theory based on this observation, naming it the "Hygiene Theory." According to his theory, for a worker to be happy and therefore productive, these environmental factors must not cause discomfort. Although the elimination of the environmental problems may make a worker productive, it will not necessarily motivate him. In contrast, he determined from the data that the motivators were elements that enriched a person's job

Thus according to Herzberg theory People's attitudes about work is influenced by a two-dimensonal paradigm of factors. He thus distinguished between hygiene factors and motivators. According to the theory, the absence of hygiene factors can create job dissatisfaction, but their presence does not motivate or create satisfaction. Under hygiene factors he included such factors as-

• company policy,

• supervision,

• interpersonal relations,

• working conditions, and

• salary.

While hygiene factors were needed to ensure an employee was not dissatisfied, in order to motivate an employee into higher performance motivation factors were needed.

Under the category Motivation Factors Herzberg include the following.

• Achievement

• Achievement Recognition

• Responsibility

• Advancement

• Growth

"These motivators (satisfiers) were associated with long-term positive effects in job performance while the hygiene factors (dissatisfiers) consistently produced only short-term changes in job attitudes and performance, which quickly fell back to its previous level.

"In summary, satisfiers describe a person's relationship with what she or he does, many related to the tasks being performed. Dissatisfiers, on the other hand, have to do with a person's relationship to the context or environment in which she or he performs the job. The satisfiers relate to what a person does while the dissatisfiers relate to the situation in which the person does what he or she does."^*

"The combination of hygiene and motivation factors can result in four conditions.

• High Hygiene / High Motivation: The ideal situation where employees are highly motivated and have few complaints;

• High Hygiene / Low Motivation: Employees have few complaints but are not highly motivated. "The job is a paycheck" situation;

• Low Hygiene / High Motivation: Employees are motivate but have a lot of complaints. A situation where the job is exciting and challenging but salaries and work conditions are not up to par;

• Low Hygiene / Low Motivation: The worst situation. Unmotivated employees with lots of complaints."^**

^*[Source: Website of edresearch.org - Publisher of online journal "Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation (PARE) - URL - http://edresearch.org/pare/getvn.asp?v=5&n=11]

^**[Source: Website of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - URL -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Herzberg]