Fixing what people complain about at work can stop the complaints and still leave nobody keener on the job. That is the central claim of the Herzberg two factor theory, set out by Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner and Barbara Snyderman in their 1959 book The Motivation to Work.¹

Herzberg argued that satisfaction and dissatisfaction come from different sources. Motivators (achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility and growth) create satisfaction; hygiene factors (company policy, supervision, relationships, working conditions, salary, status and security) only prevent dissatisfaction.² Later research found the strict split mainly where Herzberg’s story-based interviews were used, not in rating surveys, while his advice on redesigning jobs has aged better.³

Used well, the theory turns into two questions you can put to any team this week: what gets in the way of good work, and what made the work feel worth doing lately? The first list tells you what to fix; the second tells you how to redesign the job. The last section shows how to run both. For the wider idea these questions feed into, see the plain-English guide to employee engagement.

What the Herzberg two factor theory claims

The two-factor theory claims that the factors behind satisfaction at work and those behind dissatisfaction are two separate sets, so improving one set does not move the other. Herzberg drew it from interviews in which engineers and accountants described specific high and low points in their jobs.

In the 1959 study, 200 engineers and accountants were asked to tell any story they liked about a time they felt exceptionally good or exceptionally bad about their job. This is the critical-incident method, and the details of the stories were then sorted into categories.³ Good stories tended to be about the work: finishing something difficult, being recognized for it, being trusted with more. Bad stories tended to be about the surroundings: a rule that made no sense, an unfair supervisor, a pay grievance.²

From that pattern, Herzberg drew his boldest idea, which he put this way in 1968:

The opposite of job satisfaction is not job dissatisfaction but, rather, no job satisfaction; and similarly, the opposite of job dissatisfaction is not job satisfaction, but no job dissatisfaction.

He offered a reason: two different kinds of need. Hygiene factors answer the need to avoid pain from the environment; motivators answer the need to achieve and, through achievement, to grow. In his view, only the second kind comes from the content of the job itself.²

1. Hygiene factors: company policy, supervision, relationships, working conditions, salary, status and security; on Herzberg’s account they move people from dissatisfaction to no dissatisfaction
2. Motivators: achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility and growth; on Herzberg’s account they move people from no satisfaction to satisfaction

Take an accountant in both conditions. A broken expense system and a cramped office make her irritable; fixing both removes the irritation, but she is not suddenly eager. What would make her eager, on Herzberg’s account, is owning a hard audit from start to finish and seeing that it mattered. So when you hear a complaint, ask which scale it sits on before deciding what fixing it will buy you.

The evidence Herzberg gathered

By 1968 Herzberg reported that interview studies across many kinds of job, in several countries, had found the same pattern. His own summary is the key evidence for the theory, and it deserves a careful look because of how it was collected.

The study

Limited evidence

How often did good stories involve motivators? Herzberg's 1968 tally of 12 studies

Employees from lower-level supervisors, nurses and food handlers to military officers, engineers, Finnish foremen and Hungarian engineers described job events that had led to extreme satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Of all the factors behind satisfying events, 81% were motivators; of all the factors behind dissatisfying events, 69% were hygiene factors.²

The spread of jobs and countries is impressive. The weakness is that every study in the tally asked the same kind of question, so the pattern may belong partly to the question. Herzberg said studies using other methods agreed, but his tally counts only these interviews. Herzberg’s percentages also leave room for overlap: some good stories involved hygiene factors and some bad stories involved motivators.²

An example from South Africa shows what the theory looks like when it fits. In 2010 and 2011, researchers interviewed 26 supervisors of community health workers in marginalized communities around Durban. The supervisors were dissatisfied with their low pay, yet stayed motivated by making a difference and by the chance to build a career.⁴ Low pay was a grievance; it did not drain their commitment.

The practical point is about method. When you read an exit interview, a staff survey or a consultant’s report, check how the question was asked, because stories about memorable moments and ratings on a scale can point to different causes.

Hygiene factors and motivators on one grid

Reading the two scales side by side gives four situations a manager will recognize. The grid is a common way to teach the theory, not something Herzberg measured, but it shows why the two sets of factors call for different fixes.

Motivators weakMotivators strongHygiene poorHygiene good

Hygiene poor, Motivators weak: Complaints, little drivefix the conditions and the job itself

Hygiene poor, Motivators strong: Committed but frustratedpeople value the work and resent the conditions

Hygiene good, Motivators weak: No complaints, no sparkthe job is only a paycheck

Hygiene good, Motivators strong: What Herzberg aimed forfair conditions and work worth doing

The health-worker supervisors sit in the top right: frustrated by pay, still committed. The common trap is the bottom left. A company improves pay bands, benefits and the office, complaints fall, and managers wonder why nobody takes initiative. On Herzberg’s account, nothing about the work changed, so nothing about motivation should have.

So diagnose before you spend. If a team’s complaints are all about conditions, better conditions are the fix, and you should expect less dissatisfaction rather than more enthusiasm.

What critics say about the two-factor split

Critics argue that Herzberg’s split reflects how people tell stories about their own lives, not two separate systems of motivation. An early and much-cited critique is Robert House and Lawrence Wigdor’s 1967 review in Personnel Psychology.⁵ The 2016 South African study sums up their charge as oversimplifying how motivation and satisfaction relate.⁴

The mechanism behind the doubt is easy to test on yourself. Think of your best week at work this year and your worst, and notice how you explain each: it is tempting to credit the good week to what you did and blame the bad one on circumstances. Critics, including psychologist Victor Vroom in 1964, argued that Herzberg may have been recording this wish to look good: people attribute positive events to themselves and negative ones to their surroundings.³ If so, achievements land on the motivator side because people claim them, and frustrations land on the hygiene side because people blame the setting.

A 1968 review of the controversy found a consistent pattern: studies using Herzberg’s critical-incident interviews tended to support the theory, while surveys that rate satisfaction on a single scale tended not to. Ryan Smerek and Marvin Peterson’s 2007 survey, answered by about 2,200 non-academic staff at a large US public research university, is a clear example. The work itself was the strongest predictor of job satisfactionjob satisfaction: How positively a person judges and feels about their job, as a whole or in parts such as pay, colleagues or the work itself. It is usually measured by questionnaire and is related to engagement, but it is not the same thing.Full entry in the glossary, as Herzberg would expect. But satisfaction with salary, an effective supervisor and effective senior management, all hygiene factors, also predicted higher satisfaction, which the theory says they should not.³

Factors can also change sides, even in a study whose authors read their results as broadly fitting Herzberg. In focus groups held in 2017 with laboratory professionals in three Omani hospitals, relationships with co-workers and leaders, both hygiene factors for Herzberg, were the main sources of satisfaction, while recognition, a motivator, came up mostly as a complaint.⁶ The same factor can satisfy in one job and frustrate in another.

The lesson from the critics: when a factor shows up in both your team’s praise and its complaints, treat it as able to do both.

Pay: the hygiene factor that tests the theory

Herzberg classed salary as a hygiene factor, and a 2010 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary led by Timothy Judge fits part of that claim: pay level was only weakly linked to job satisfaction. Pay may still motivate, though, which Herzberg’s framing makes easy to overlook.

Herzberg was blunt about rising wages: in his view they motivated people mainly to seek the next raise.² Judge’s team pooled 115 correlations from 92 independent samples and found a correlation of about 0.15 between pay level and job satisfaction.⁷ In plain terms, better-paid people were, on average, only a little more satisfied than lower-paid ones. The link was not clearly different between US samples and those from other countries, including Great Britain, India, Australia and Taiwan.⁷

Myth

Herzberg proved that money does not motivate people.

Fact

He classed pay as a hygiene factor for satisfaction. A 2010 meta-analysis found pay only weakly linked to job satisfaction, and its authors note pay can still motivate.

The authors draw the line the theory blurs: pay having little power to satisfy does not mean it has no power to motivate. As one possible explanation, they suggest people may adapt quickly to a raise, so its satisfying value fades.⁷ Keep two limits in mind. The meta-analysis measured pay level, not whether people felt their pay was fair, and its studies were correlational. How pay works as an incentive deserves its own guide, which is planned for this section.

For a manager, the reading is this. Paying fairly still matters, because pay is among the conditions people complain about, as the Durban supervisors did, but a raise alone is unlikely to make a disengaged team keen on its work.

Why job enrichment outlived the theory

Herzberg’s practical legacy is job enrichment: adding responsibility, whole pieces of work and direct feedback to a job, rather than more of the same tasks. The idea survived even as the two-factor split was questioned, because later studies kept finding that the work itself matters for satisfaction.

Herzberg contrasted two ways of changing a job. Horizontal loading adds more of the same: a higher daily quota, an extra routine task, rotation between equally dull jobs. He compared it to adding zero to zero. Vertical loading adds motivators, and he listed seven principles, among them removing some controls while keeping people accountable, giving a person a complete natural unit of work, sending performance reports directly to the worker rather than the supervisor, and introducing new and more difficult tasks.²

His example came from a large company’s stockholder correspondents, the staff who answered shareholders’ letters. One group had its jobs enriched while a control group carried on as before. Herzberg reported that after six months the enriched group was outperforming the control group and liked their jobs much more.² It is one company’s experiment, described by the theory’s author, with no sign that the groups were chosen at random, so treat it as an illustration rather than proof.

The narrower claim, that the content of the work matters most for satisfaction, has fared better than the split. The US university survey found the work itself the strongest predictor.³ Judge and colleagues, citing earlier work, note that a job’s intrinsic features predict satisfaction better than pay appears to.⁷ In 2007, David Sachau argued that research on happiness, intrinsic motivation and materialism is broadly consistent with the theory’s basic tenets.⁸ Self-determination theory now gives a more detailed account of why interesting work motivates; a guide to it for managers is planned, and rewards versus interest in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation covers much of that ground.

Consider a customer-support agent. Horizontal loading gives her more tickets. Vertical loading lets her own a customer’s problem from first contact to fix, gives her authority to settle small refunds without sign-off, and sends her the customer’s feedback directly. Her workload may be no lighter, but the job now contains things she can finish, decide and learn from. Handing over that kind of ownership is harder than it sounds, and why delegation is hard for managers explains the usual obstacles. Pick one of Herzberg’s principles, apply it to one role and watch what happens, rather than redesigning every job at once.

How to use Herzberg’s model with a team

Use the two-factor model as a diagnostic with two questions, not as a law that sorts factors in advance. It is most useful for separating the complaints a team needs fixed from the changes that would make the work more worth doing, and least useful as proof that any factor cannot matter.

Start with the two lists. In a team meeting or in one-on-one meetings, ask separately what gets in the way of good work and what, in the last few months, made the work feel worth doing. Fix the first list because dissatisfaction matters in its own right, but do not expect it to create engagement. Use the second list to enrich one role at a time.

If the answer is no, the next change belongs to the job, not the conditions. Larger studies of what goes with engagement, such as the research on the drivers of employee engagement, give a wider view of which conditions to look at first.

WiserHours

Using the two-factor model with a team

• Ask separately what gets in the way and what makes the work worth doing
• Fix the conditions people complain about, without expecting enthusiasm to follow
• Check whether a factor shows up in both lists before sorting it
• Enrich one role by adding responsibility or a whole unit of work
• Send feedback on results directly to the person doing the work
• Ask the same two questions again a few months later

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/employee-engagement/herzberg-two-factor-theory/#checklist-herzberg-two-factor-theory-team

The bottom line

Herzberg’s two-factor theory is best read as a useful question, not a proven law. Its strict split between hygiene factors and motivators appears mainly in the story-based interviews that produced it, and later studies link pay, supervision and relationships to higher satisfaction too. What holds up is the practical core: fixing complaints and making work worth doing are different jobs, and the second one usually means changing the work itself.