Frederick Herzberg (1923-2000)

Frederick Herzberg is also an American psychologist and in-house consultant at AT&T (former telecommunications giant in the USA).

He has been specifically interested in motivation at work and draws a distinction between two types of factors: maintenance (or hygiene) factors, used to serve physical and economic needs, and motivation factors, which come into play when there are deeper aspirations to be met.

He performed a survey based on a questionnaire where participants (engineers and accountants) were asked to analyse two situations: one in which they felt particularly good and the other in which they felt exceptionally bad.

When he analysed the results, Herzberg disassociated satisfaction from dissatisfaction, and did not consider the latter to be the reverse of satisfaction for any given factor.

Generally speaking, the factors causing satisfaction are motivation factors: success, recognition, responsibility, personal progress, etc.

Dissatisfaction, on the other hand, is due above all to the non-satisfaction of maintenance factors: bad salary, bad working conditions, job insecurity, subordinate status, hierarchical control, company regulations, etc. These factors cause suffering.

He therefore suggested creating conditions in organisations that would encourage motivation and forged the notion of job enrichment. When work is enriched, it becomes less necessary to monitor it from the outside: the work is enriched by new self-control tasks.

Along the same lines, the introduction of flexible working hours or other changes belong to the same effort to motivate members of an organisation.

Herzberg's work met with enormous success among executives and consultants, but also among researchers who adopted his method.

The contingency theory

Taylor promoted a method to organise labour scientifically. Implementing this method is supposed to make it possible to define the right way to organise work, the "One best way". Every organisation should be organised in this way. Consultants and engineers, labour organisation specialists are supposed to head towards this goal. This taylorian one best way was to be completed with the definition of the right command structure within the organisation and with the optimised management of human relations in line with the logic of feeling that drives the human being. Thus, even enriched, organisational theory still tends to define the right organisation, regardless of the company or authority considered.

In the 1960's, however, various works demonstrated that there was not ONE best way.

On the contrary, each organisation has to define, for itself, how best to organise work.

Environment

Tom Burns and G. Stalker, in 1961, showed that there is a relationship between the environment and the form of organisation. If the environment is stable, then the organisation can develop technical routines and thus define procedures and fixed forms of organisation. Work within the organisation is defined by standards, with respect to which only slight variations are necessary. On the other hand, in situations involving extensive technological change and market development, such an organisation would be counter­productive. A project-based organisation, with objectives and the means of checking that operations are in line with these, is preferable in this case. For situations in which there is ongoing innovation and a constantly changing market, the organisation should also adopt a dynamic approach and constantly redefine itself. Hence, there is not one right organisational solution to be applied to all situations. The works of J. LORSCH and P. LAWRENCE, in 1967, also pointed out a relationship between the environment and the type of international differentiation within an organisation. When the environment is uncertain and unstable, there should be even greater differentiation and multi-disciplinary teams should be involved in projects.

Production system

Along the same lines, Joan WOODWARD, in 1965, also showed the existence of a relationship between the type of organisation and the production system. For mass production (automotive industry or consumer industry), organisations often have a conventional, formal structure. On the other hand, the production of small series (e.g. the aviation industry), or unit-based production systems (e.g. the Channel Tunnel), have more flexible structures. Finally, companies with process flow production systems (e.g. the petrochemical industry), require yet another form of organisation, backed up by the monitoring and a means of acting on the processes.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 747