organization

This Week’s Citation Classic CC/NUMBER 19 IHerzberg F, MausnerB & SnydermanB B. The motivation to work.

New York: Wiley, 1959. 157 p. (Dept. Psychology,WesternReserveUniv., Cleveland.OH andDept. Psychology. BeaverCollege, Glenside,PAJ

The book describes the original re- search leading to the development of motivation-hygiene theory. It suggests that there are no antonyms for affec- tive states. In this instance, job satisfac- tion and job dissatisfaction are separate continua produced by dif- ferent sets of job factors. [The Social Sciences Citation Index® (SSCI®) in- dicates that this book has been cited in over 795 publications since 1966.]

Frederick I. Herzberg Graduate School of Business

University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112

March 13, 1984 “In 1950, I received my PhD in

psychology. I was offered a fellow- ship to attend the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. My major was to be in industrial mental health under the direction of an industrial psy- chiatrist from McGill University in Canada by the name of Graham Taylor. Unfortunately, I soon dis- covered that the concepts of indus- trial mental health were really a re- statement of the concepts of men- tal illness that I had previously studied in clinical and abnormal psychology. Reflecting this disap- pointment, I entitled my Public Health Practice thesis Mental Health Is Not the Opposite of Men- tal Illness. After receiving my mas- ter’s degree in public health, I took a job as research director for Psy- chological Services of Pittsburgh. A local industrialist came to see me after a nasty labor relations

disturbance and asked me plain- tively, ‘What do people want from their jobs?’ I answered him in typi- cal academic fashion, ‘Sir, I don’t know but if you give me enough money I will find out.’.

“I followed up on my School of Public Health thesis by designing a study to test the hypothesis that job satisfaction and job dissatisfac- tion were separate concepts. The result was the book, The Motiva- tion to Work, which led to a funda- mentally different approach to the study of people’s affective states. This is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Motiva- tion to Work. The original study has produced perhaps more repli- cations than any other research in the history of industrial and orga- nizational psychology. The new ap- proach to viewing job attitudes was the beginning of many present- day concepts and applications of industrial and organizational psy- chology (e.g., job enrichment, qual- ity control circles, quality of work life, cafeteria-style benefits, guar- anteed annual wage, flextime, etc.).

“Bernard Mausner and Barbara Snyderman were two senior mem- bers of my research staff. Both of them contributed significantly to the carrying out of the research and to the publication of The Moti- vation to Work.

“I have since published three major amplifications of motiva- tion-hygiene theory: Work and the Nature of Man,l The Managerial Choice,2 and Herzberg on Motiva- tion.”3

I. HerzbergFI. Work andthe nature of man. New York: Crowell, 1966. 203 p. 2. (The managerialchoice. Salt Lake City. UT: Olympus, 1982.360 p. 3. . Herzbe,~on motivation. Cleveland, OH: Penton/IPC,1983. 52 p.

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