Welcome to Taking the Beers. In this video, we're going to have a look at another one of our motivation theories. We're going to go Neo-Human Relations School again alongside Maslow.
This time, we're going to have a look at the work of Frederik Hertzberg, who probably developed the most different approach to motivational theory of all of the motivational thinkers we might learn about for A-level. So we've got Taylor, who was a big believer in money being the guiding motivator, the key principle that increases productivity. We've got Mayo prophesying that it's social factors and team working.
We've got Maslow saying that both of those are true, but at different stages of your career and other factors are important as well. What we've got with Hertzberg is somebody actually rejecting those three theories and saying, actually, I don't agree with any of them. And I've got my own things that I feel are motivational in the workplace. So what Hertzberg did was that he split the factors that are in play when people have a job into two different categories.
The first he called hygiene factors, the second he called motivators. Now hygiene factors according to Hertzberg were aspects of your job that did not motivate you, would not make you increase your productivity or work any harder. But if you felt unhappy about one of those aspects of work, if you were disgruntled, if you felt that that was a need that you had that was not being met by your employer, it could demotivate you. It could damage your morale. It could decrease your productivity.
But improvements in those areas wouldn't actually increase motivation and gain productivity. Now, this is where Hertzberg's theory attracts a little bit of controversy because front and centre of his hygiene facts those factors that don't motivate workers to be more productive, he's put pay and monetary rewards. And according to Hertzberg, if you feel like you're underpaid it's gonna make you feel undervalued, it's gonna make you unhappy, it's gonna make you disgruntled, it's gonna demotivate you, it's gonna damage your productivity.
But just being given more money is not going to make you work harder, it's not going to increase your productivity. So according to Hertzberg, Pay is a hygiene factor. The prospect of greater pay is not enough to stimulate long-term gains in productivity from employees.
He threw some other things in there that were classified as hygiene factors according to him. So the working environment and feeling that you had nice working facilities, that you had things like staff rooms and canteens, many of the ideas that flowed out of the work of Elton Mayo to give more sort of social context to the workplace. Hertzberg's rejecting those and saying no if you feel like those needs are not met you're going to be unhappy but the prospect of them isn't going to motivate you as another slap in the chops for Mayo there he's got relationship with colleagues and team working as another hygiene factor as well so if you don't feel like you really have the support and the social elements of work that you're looking for it will be a demotivator but it won't on its own encourage you to be more productive So we're throwing a big pie in the face of Taylor here with the two-factor theory, saying that pay doesn't work. We're throwing a massive pie in the face of Mayo here, saying that team working doesn't motivate people.
And we're also throwing partial pies in the direction of Maslow, who was working at a very similar time to Hertzberg, saying, you've got these things in your hierarchy of needs. But Hertzberg's saying these ain't things that motivate you. If you want to motivate employees, according to Hertzberg, you've got to dip down into his motivators.
These are the things that would genuinely stimulate greater work and productivity from employees, according to our mate Freddie H. So we've got things like opportunities for promotion and self-improvement. So we'll be throwing those on the top echelons of Maslow's hierarchy, while Hertzberg's saying, actually, this is your starting point for motivation. This is the kind of things that actually stimulates greater work rate and productivity from your labor force alongside things for alongside ideas like promotion it's also the idea of self-improvement so things like training that can lead to self-betterment and new skills that can be motivational as well and importantly the design of people's jobs according to Hertzberg could be motivational as well now remember with Taylorism he was a big advocate of breaking down the production process of the division of labor of getting workers to specialize in just one task that is the antithesis of what our mate Hertzberg's bringing to the table here he would say job design actually is all important in being a motivational factor and that really we should be looking to try and enlarge people's jobs give them a greater variety of tasks to work on so that they've got some you know change in their working day to help keep them motivated and stimulate them.
Alongside giving them a greater variety of tasks, we should also make use of something called job enrichment. That's giving workers more challenging, complex tasks to do. So not just a wider variety of simple tasks, but more challenging, complex tasks in order to stretch them and keep them motivated, keep them interested.
Alongside job enlargement and job enrichment, Hertzberg was an advocate of of also trying to empower the workforce as well. So not just giving them a greater number of tasks and more complex tasks, but actually giving them some power, some decision-making autonomy, actually giving them some ownership over decisions that were being made in the organization in order to make them feel more responsible and more valued. and stimulate their motivation.
So here we've probably got a motivational theory that's almost at loggerheads with some of the others that we have learnt about for A-level. But it really is the first theory to actually come down and say, hey, these factors aren't motivational and these factors are. Now, there are question marks against Hertzberg's theory.
was never really tested out on large numbers of employees it was a theory that was really not grounded in great research unlike the work of taylor and mayo that did have more empirical evidence to back it up but it really was a theory that at the time got thinkers in organizations to really plot whether they were focusing on the right elements of their workforce in order to try and stimulate greater productivity we've got links up there to all of our other motivational videos we've got some taylor some maslow we've got some mayo in there as well hopefully your revision's going well it's a long hard road it will pay off keep on taking the biz we'll see you soon for another tutorial