Two-Factor Theory

Before the midto late 1950s, it always made sense to most people who thought about it that the opposite of employee job satisfaction was job dissatisfaction and that the opposite of job dissatisfaction was job satisfaction. The more a person had one of these on the job, the less he or she had of the other—they were opposite concepts, experiences at two extremes of a common continuum.

Then, in 1957, Frederick Herzberg, a psychiatrist from Pittsburgh, and his colleagues did a thorough review of the literature of job attitudes and came forth with a new hypothesis that they tested later in an empirical study of 200 engineers and accountants, asking them to recall events that made them especially happy or unhappy about their jobs. Herzberg, Bernard Mausner, and Barbara Bloch Snyderman published a book, based on those findings, that revolutionized thinking about employee attitudes and, subsequently, considerable management policy and practice. Herzberg and his colleagues proposed that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction were not the opposite ends of a single continuum; rather, they claimed that that they are orthogonal constructs, each caused by different antecedent conditions and resulting in different consequences. Job content factors, the motivators (so called because the results indicated that people performed better after events involving these factors), were necessary to make people happy at their jobs, but not sufficient. On the other hand, the hygienes—which were elements of the job context, such as employer policies, work relationships, and working conditions—had to be in place to prevent job dissatisfaction but, by themselves, could not create job satisfaction, and, consequently, work motivation.

Tremendous controversy ensued among academics during the 1960s and early 1970s, mostly because of the empirical methods employed. It was alleged that the results of the research, and therefore the major tenets of the theory, were artifacts of the critical incident technique employed in the research. Tests of the theory, using other research methods, frequently failed to support the two-factor, orthogonal conclusion of the new model. The basic thrust of these criticisms, predicated on attribution theory, was that, naturally, people would attribute “felt-good” experiences to events during which they had a role, whereas events that had caused dissatisfaction had to have been caused by external factors.

In addition, there had been considerable overlap between the hygienes and the motivators in felt-good and felt-bad stories. In fairness, these overlaps were noted in the 1959 book in which Herzberg and colleagues reported their findings. For example, failure to receive recognition for good work (recognition being categorized as a motivator) was the principal cause of 18% of the felt-bad episodes. There was similar (although not as strong) association reported between instances of job dissatisfaction and two other motivators—work itself and advancement. Therefore, the empirical distinctions between the two categories of work factors and instances of job satisfaction/dissatisfaction were neither total nor definitive.

Just the same, both scientific and popular interpretations of the theory tended to overlook the overlaps and the acknowledgment by Herzberg and his colleagues of the existence of the overlaps. As is so often the case in the histories of theories of work motivation, caveats, exceptions, boundary conditions, and exceptions to the rule are overlooked as science carries on and practical applications are produced and sold to consumers, as noted by C. C. Pinder both in 1988 and in a forthcoming publication. Pinder wrote in 1977 that the commercial desire for a new, innovative model propelled the two-factor theory into classrooms and boardrooms for many years, caveats notwithstanding. It is one of the most known and recognized theories of management today, as noted by G. P. Latham and Pinder in 2005 and by J. B. Miner in 2003.

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