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Purpose and benefits

‘People are our greatest assets’ has become one of the most over-used clichés in business.

Before the time of Hertzberg and his colleagues of the humanist school, however, ‘people issues’ took a low priority in management literature. Management thinkers rarely sought the opinions of employees or considered them worthy of study.

The research that made Hertzberg’s name tackled the question of employee motivation directly. His results indicated that the factors that motivate people to work fall into two distinct categories—he called them ‘hygiene factors’ and ‘motivation factors’. The former, in his view, do not provide positive motivation—but their absence causes dissatisfaction, in the same way that hygiene prevents disease rather than increasing well-being. The latter speak to people’s higher needs and do produce positive satisfaction.