Employee Motivation Is Critical to the Success of an Organization. Discuss How Managers Motivate Their Employees by Using the Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory. Illustrate Your Answer with Academic Literature Review and Examples.

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The job of a manager in the workplace is to get things done through employees. For doing this managers should be able to motivate the employees. One of the most important yet difficult responsibilities of a leader in any organisation is motivating staff (Staren, 2009, pp.74-77). Well motivated employees can lead to the result of higher productivity; higher performance and it can also help to improve the work quality and profits across all the departments. There are many theorists have complied their own conclusions and consequently a wide variety of motivational theory has been produced. Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory is one of the content theories of motivation. This theory is used for better understands about the employees’ working relationship, attitudes, and performance motivators.

The two factors of Motivation-Hygiene Theory
Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory attempts to explain the factors that motivate employees by identifying and satisfying their individual needs, desires and the aims pursued to satisfy those desires. According to Herzberg, there are two factors that cause motivation and demotivation in an organisation (Halepota, 2005, pp.14-18). He called those factors which enhanced job satisfaction as the motivators and those factors which caused job dissatisfaction as the hygiene factors. What makes employees satisfied at work refers to the factors that related to the content of their jobs. On the other hand, what makes employees unhappy at work is not what they do but how well or poorly they are treated. These treatment factors are related not to the content of work, but to the context of the job.

Luthans (2002, pp. 262-265) states that ‘good feelings were generally associated with job experiences and job content’. Potential for achievement, receiving recognition, the work itself, being giving responsibility, the potential for advancement and the potential for growth are the factors that found to affect job satisfaction. Herzberg called these factors “motivators”, they are present in appropriate amounts in any organization, and they bring about work motivation as a corollary to their creating positive attitudes of job satisfaction. In the studies reviewed by Herzberg, the three motivators most consistently mentioned as producing job satisfaction are achievement, recognition, and responsibility (Boe, 1970, pp. 99-101). These represent accomplishment, and reinforcement for accomplishment, and increasing challenge, these are the basic components of psychological growth.

An example for describing motivator was an employee is given a challenge task and also made responsible to complete that task in his own way, this creates confident. In turn, the employee will do his best to accomplish the task. If as a reward of that achievement, the employee gets recognition and advancement, this will motivate that employee to take such tasks in the future and to try his best to accomplish them.

Hygiene factors
On the other hand, job dissatisfaction is determined by the feelings the individual has to the context or the environment in which his task is accomplished (Herzberg, 1965, pp.393-402). The factors that have been found to describe the job environments are the company policy and administration, quality of supervision, working conditions, salary, personal life, status, job security and the employee’s interpersonal relationships with superiors, peers and subordinates. These factors are called hygiene factors. Whitsett and Winslow (1967, pp. 391-415) found that hygiene factors, when at a low level, serve to bring about poor job attitudes and are related to a psychologically poor work environment. However, when these factors are at a high level they serve to prevent poor job attitudes but they neither push the employee to continuing superior performance nor lead to job satisfaction.

Using the same example as used to show the motivators – if the employee was given a...
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