Motivation Theories: Maslow, Herzberg, and More

Posted on Mar 6, 2025 in Energy Resources, Fuels, and Explosives Engineering

Understanding Motivation in the Workplace

Individuals base their behavior not on the way their external environment actually is but rather on what they see or believe it to be.

Key Elements of Motivation

  1. Intensity: Measures how hard a person tries. This is the element most of us focus on when we talk about motivation. However, high intensity is unlikely to lead to favorable job-performance outcomes unless the effort is channeled in a

  2. Direction: Benefits the organization.

  3. Persistence: Measures how long a person can maintain effort. When motivated, individuals stay with a task long enough to achieve their goal.

Early Theories of Motivation

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Lower Order Needs (satisfied internally within the person):

  • Physiological – Includes hunger, thirst, shelter, sex, and other bodily needs
  • Safety – Security and protection from physical and emotional harm

Higher Order Needs (satisfied externally by pay, union contracts, tenure, etc.):

  • Social – Affection, belongingness, acceptance, and friendship
  • Esteem – Internal factors such as self-respect, autonomy, and achievement, and external factors such as status, recognition, and attention.
  • Self-actualization – Drive to become what we are capable of becoming; includes growth, achieving our potential, and self-fulfillment

Theory X and Theory Y

Theory X is that managers believe employees inherently dislike work and must therefore be directed or even coerced into performing it. In Theory Y, managers assume employees can view work as being as natural as rest or play, and therefore the average person can learn to accept, and even seek, responsibility. (Assumes higher order needs dominate individuals.

Two-Factor Theory (Herzberg)

Frederick Herzberg wondered “What do people want from their jobs?” He asked people to describe, in detail, situations in which they felt exceptionally good or bad about their jobs. Respondents who felt good about their work tended to attribute these factors to themselves. Dissatisfied respondents tended to cite extrinsic factors, such as supervision, pay, company policies, and working conditions. He claimed that the opposite of “satisfaction” is “no satisfaction” and the opposite of “dissatisfaction” is “no dissatisfaction.” Therefore, factors that lead to job satisfaction are separate and distinct from those that lead to job dissatisfaction and managers who seek to eliminate factors that can create job dissatisfaction may bring about peace, but not necessarily motivation. They will be placating rather than motivating their workers.

Factors such as quality of supervision, pay, company policies, physical working conditions, relationships with others, and job security are hygiene factors – when they’re adequate, people will not be dissatisfied; nor will they be satisfied. If we want to motivate people on their jobs, Herzberg suggested emphasizing factors associated with the work itself or with outcomes directly derived from it, such as promotional opportunities, personal growth opportunities, recognition, responsibility, and achievement. These are the characteristics people find intrinsically rewarding.

Criticisms of Herzberg’s Theory:
  • His methodology is limited because it relies on self-reports. When things are going well, people tend to take credit. Contrarily, they blame failure on the extrinsic environment.
  • The raters make interpretations, contaminating the findings by interpreting one response in one manner while treating a similar response differently.
  • No overall measure of satisfaction is utilized. A person may dislike part of a job yet still think the job is acceptable overall.
  • He assumed a relationship between satisfaction and productivity, but he looked only at satisfaction. To make his search relevant, we must assume a strong relationship between satisfaction and productivity.

McClelland’s Theory of Needs

(Less practical than the other approaches because the three needs are subconscious and therefore difficult to measure)

  • Need for Achievement (nAch) is the drive to excel, to achieve in relationship to a set of standards.
  • Need for Power (nPow) is the need to make others behave in a way they would not have otherwise
  • Need for Affiliation (nAff) is the desire for friendly and close interpersonal relationships.

High achievers perform best when they perceive their probability of success as 0.5, or 50/50. They dislike gambling because they get no achievement satisfaction from success that comes by pure chance. They dislike low odds (high probability of success) because then there is no challenge to their skills. They like to stretch themselves with their goals. When jobs have a high degree of personal responsibility and feedback and an intermediate degree of risk, high achievers are strongly motivated. People with a high achievement need are interested in how well they do personally, and not in influencing others to do well; thus they make not make great managers. Needs for affiliation and power tend to be closely related to managerial success. The best managers are high in their need for power and low in their need for affiliation. In fact, a high power motive may be a requirement for managerial effectiveness.

Goal-Setting Theory and Management by Objectives

Rewards and specific work standards will improve intrinsic motivation if people believe they are in control of their behavior. Rewards and deadlines diminish motivation if people see them as coercive. For example: If a senior sales rep really enjoys selling and making the deal, a commission indicates she is doing a good job and increases her sense of competence by providing feedback that could improve intrinsic motivation. On the other hand, if a computer programmer values writing code because she likes to solve problems, then a reward for working to an externally imposed standard she does not accept, such as writing a certain number of lines of code every day, could feel coercive, and her intrinsic motivation would suffer. She would be less interested in the task and might reduce her effort.

A recent outgrowth of self-determination theory is self-concordance, which considers how strongly people’s reasons for pursuing goals are consistent with their interests and core values. If individuals pursue goals because of an intrinsic interest, they are more likely to attain their goals and are happy even if they do not.

Goal-Setting Theory

Research on Goal-Setting Theory reveals impressive effects of goal specificity, challenge, and feedback on performance. Goals tell an employee what needs to be done and how much effort is needed. Evidence strongly suggests that specific goals increase performance; that difficult goals, when accepted, result in higher performance than do easy goals; and that feedback leads to higher performance than does nonfeedback. Although easier goals are more likely to be accepted, once a hard task is accepted, we can expect the employee to exert a high level of effort to try to achieve it. Challenging goals get our attention and thus tend to help us focus. Difficult goals energize us because we have to work harder to attain them. When goals are difficult, people persist in trying to attain them. Difficult goals lead us to discover strategies that help us perform the job or task more effectively. If we have to struggle to solve a difficult problem, we often think of a better way to go about it. People do better when they get feedback on how well they are progressing toward their goals, because it helps identify discrepancies between what they have done and what they want to do next – that is, feedback guides behavior. Self-generated feedback – with which employees are able to monitor their own progress – is more powerful than externally generated feedback

Goal-setting theory assumes an individual is committed to the goal and determined not to lower or abandon it. The individual (1) believes she can achieve the goal and (2) wants to achieve it. Goal commitment is most likely to occur when goals are made public, when the individual has an internal locus of control, and when the goals are self-set rather than assigned. Goals themselves seem to affect performance more strongly when tasks are simple rather than complex, well learned rather than novel, and independent rather than interdependent.

Management by Objectives (MBO)

To make goal-setting theory operational, management has created a more systematic approach called Management by Objectives (MBO). MBO emphasized participatively set goals that are tangible, verifiable, and measurable. The organization’s overall objectives are translated into specific objectives for each level (divisional, departmental, individual). Because lower-unit managers jointly participate in setting their own goals, MBO works from the bottom up as well as from the top down. The result is a hierarchy that links objectives at one level to those at the next. And for the individual employee, MBO provides specific personal performance objectives.

Four ingredients are common to MBO programs:

  1. Goal specificity
  2. Participation in decision making (including the setting of goals or objectives)
  3. An explicit time period.
  4. Performance feedback

Organizational Justice and Equity Theory

Employees perceive what they get from a job situation (salary levels, raises, recognition) in relationship to what they put into it (effort, experience, education, competence), and then they compare their outcome – input ratio with that of relevant others. If we perceive our ratio to be equal to that of the relevant others with whom we compare ourselves, a state of equity exists; we perceive that our situation is fair and justice prevails. When we see the ratio as unequal and we feel underrewarded, we experience equity tension that creates anger. When we see ourselves as overrewarded, tension creates guilt.

The referent an employee selects adds to the complexity of equity theory. There are four referent comparisons:

  • Self-inside – An employee’s experiences in a different position inside the employee’s current organization
  • Self-outside – An employee’s experiences in a situation or position outside the employee’s current organization.
  • Other-inside – Another individual or group of individuals inside the employee’s organization
  • Other-outside – Another individual or group of individuals outside the employee’s organization.

Based on equity theory, employees who perceive inequity will make one of six choices:

  1. Change inputs (exert less effort if underpaid or more if overpaid)
  2. Change outcomes (individuals paid on a piece-rate basis can increase their pay by producing a higher qty of units of lower quality)
  3. Distort perceptions of self (“I used to think I worked at a moderate pace, but now I realize I work a lot harder than everyone else.”)
  4. Distort perceptions of others (“Mike’s job isn’t as desirable as I thought.”)
  5. Choose a different referent (“I may not make as much as my brother-in-law, but I’m doing a lot better than my Dad did when he was my age.”)
  6. Leave the field (quit the job)

Employees perceive their organizations as just when they believe rewards and the way they are distributed are fair. In other words, fairness or equity can be subjective; what one person sees as unfair, another may see as perfectly appropriate. In general, people see allocations or procedures favoring themselves as fair.

A key element of organizational justice is the view that justice is multidimensional. How much we get paid relative to what we think we should be paid (distributive justice) is obviously important. However, research shows that how we get paid is just as important. Thus the model of organizational justice includes procedural justice – the perceived fairness of the process used to determine the distribution of rewards. Finally, interactional justice describes an individual’s perceptions of the degree to which she is treated with dignity, concern, and respect.

Two key elements of procedural justice are process control and explanations. Process Control is the opportunity to present your point of view about desired outcomes to decision makers. Explanations are clear reasons management gives for the outcome. Therefore, for employees to see a process as fair, they need to feel they have some control over the outcome and that they were given an adequate explanation about why the outcome occurred.

Expectancy Theory

The Expectancy Theory argues that the strength of our tendency to act a certain way depends on the strength of our expectation of a given outcome and its attractiveness. Essentially, employees will be motivated to exert a high level of effort when they believe it will lead to a good performance appraisal; that a good appraisal will lead to organizational rewards such as salary increases, and/or intrinsic rewards; and that the rewards will satisfy the employees’ personal goals. The theory focuses on 3 relationships:

  • Effort-Performance Relationship – The probability perceived by the individual that exerting a given amount of effort will lead to performance “If I give a maximum effort, will it be recognized in my performance appraisal?”

  • Performance-Reward Relationship – The degree to which the individual believes performing at a particular level will lead to the attainment of a desired outcome “If I get a good performance appraisal, will it lead to organizational rewards?”

  • Rewards-Personal Goal Relationship – The degree to which organizational rewards satisfy an individual’s personal goals or needs and the attractiveness of those potential rewards for the individual. “If I’m rewarded, are the rewards attractive to me?”