DDBA 8524 Week 10 Herzberg Evidence Critique Example

Accountants and Engineers in Pittsburgh as a Theory of Everyone: An Evidence Critique of Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory and the Limits of Applying It to Workers in Other Settings

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Walden University

DDBA 8524: Seminar in Multicultural Management

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Month Day, Year

Accountants and Engineers in Pittsburgh as a Theory of Everyone: An Evidence Critique of Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory and the Limits of Applying It to Workers in Other Settings

The Claim

Herzberg et al. (1959) proposed that the factors that make people satisfied with work differ from those that make them dissatisfied. In their scheme, one cluster of conditions, achievement, recognition, the content of the job, responsibility and the chance to advance, can lift people into satisfaction, while a second cluster, company policy, supervision, pay, relations with coworkers and physical conditions, can only push people into dissatisfaction if neglected and buys no extra effort if improved. The theory, often called the two-factor or motivation-hygiene theory, has been taught in management courses for decades and applied in organizations around the world. This critique asks whether the evidence supports the theory's generality.

The Original Evidence

Herzberg's study interviewed about 200 accountants and engineers in firms near Pittsburgh. Respondents described times they felt especially good and especially bad about their jobs, and researchers coded the factors mentioned. Satisfying episodes mostly involved achievement and recognition; dissatisfying ones mostly involved policy and supervision.

Problems With the Method

House and Wigdor (1967) reviewed the theory and the evidence for it and raised several problems. The first is that the critical incident method may produce the result. People tend to credit themselves for good events and blame circumstances or others for bad ones, so asking for stories of good and bad times would yield achievement in good stories and supervision in bad stories whether or not the two-factor structure is real. House and Wigdor noted that studies using other methods often failed to replicate the separation, finding that some factors contributed to both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The second problem is that satisfaction and motivation are different things; the theory moved from what people said satisfied them to claims about what makes them work harder, without measuring performance.

Problems With the Sample

The sample was professional, American, male and drawn from one region in the 1950s. Accountants and engineers had stable jobs, adequate salaries and some control over their work. For workers whose pay is low or insecure, salary may well motivate, not merely prevent dissatisfaction. Hofstede (1980) argued that American motivation theories reflect American values, including a high place for individual achievement, and that such theories may describe motivation poorly in societies that put greater weight on security or on relationships within a group.

What the Theory Still Offers

The theory remains a useful prompt: managers who rely only on pay and conditions may miss the role of meaningful work and recognition. But it is a hypothesis about some workers, not a law about all, and the evidence for its central separation is weak even for the original population.

Implications for Multicultural Management

A manager in a multinational should not assume that recognition and challenging work will motivate a factory workforce in a low-income setting more than wages, nor that pay raises will fail to motivate. The safer approach is to ask workers directly in each setting, using methods less prone to self-serving accounts, such as surveys of what employees would trade for what, and to test changes on a small scale. Tsui et al. (2007) urged researchers to test whether theories developed in one country hold in others before treating them as general, and the advice applies to managers as much as researchers.

What a Better Test Would Look Like

A fair test of the theory in another setting would avoid the critical incident method's bias by measuring satisfaction, motivation and performance separately and over time. Researchers could survey workers on each factor, measure output or quality independently and see whether improvements in pay or conditions change effort as well as complaints. Where such designs have been used, the clean split between the two sets of factors has generally not appeared. A test in a low-wage manufacturing setting in, for example, Bangladesh or Honduras would be especially informative, since that is where managers most often apply the theory and where its assumption that pay cannot motivate is least plausible.

Why the Theory Persists

The theory endures partly because it is simple, memorable and flattering to managers, suggesting that they can motivate with recognition rather than pay. Its persistence is a reminder that a theory's use in practice is not evidence for it.

A Note on Teaching the Theory

Courses that teach the theory could present it alongside House and Wigdor's critique, so students learn both the idea and how to judge the evidence for it. That pairing turns a list of factors into an exercise in reading research.

Conclusion

The two-factor theory's popularity exceeds its evidence. Its method may have produced its result, its sample was narrow, and its leap from satisfaction to motivation was untested.

References

Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. B. (1959). The motivation to work (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.

Hofstede, G. (1980). Motivation, leadership, and organization: Do American theories apply abroad? Organizational Dynamics, 9(1), 42-63. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(80)90013-3

House, R. J., & Wigdor, L. A. (1967). Herzberg's dual-factor theory of job satisfaction and motivation: A review of the evidence and a criticism. Personnel Psychology, 20(4), 369-389. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1967.tb02440.x

Tsui, A. S., Nifadkar, S. S., & Ou, A. Y. (2007). Cross-national, cross-cultural organizational behavior research: Advances, gaps, and recommendations. Journal of Management, 33(3), 426-478. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206307300818