About hygiene and job satisfaction

Throughout my professional life, I’ve found that economic growth and happiness are not correlated at all. Most people face the money vs. engagement dichotomy, and that seems to be better explained by Psychologist Frederick Herzberg’s Two-factor theory.

According to Herzberg, these factors are not part of the same spectrum. In other words, you could love your work but also be completely dissatisfied. Here are different variables to compare:

Directly from Wikipedia:

Two-factor theory distinguishes between:

Motivators (e.g. challenging work, recognition for one’s achievement, responsibility, opportunity to do something meaningful, involvement in decision making, sense of importance to an organization) that give positive satisfaction, arising from intrinsic conditions of the job itself, such as recognition, achievement, or personal growth

Hygiene factors (e.g. status, job security, salary, fringe benefits, work conditions, good pay, paid insurance, vacations) that do not give positive satisfaction or lead to higher motivation, though dissatisfaction results from their absence. The term “hygiene” is used in the sense that these are maintenance factors. These are extrinsic to the work itself, and include aspects such as company policies, supervisory practices, or wages/salary. Herzberg often referred to hygiene factors as “KITA” factors, which is an acronym for “kick in the ass”, the process of providing incentives or threat of punishment to make someone do something.

According to Herzberg, hygiene factors are what causes dissatisfaction among employees in the workplace. In order to remove dissatisfaction in a work environment, these hygiene factors must be eliminated.

Think about it. You may be in an amazing institution, in which you have high hygiene, but low motivators, and you might not feel as good as in an institution with low hygiene with high motivators. These variables are a complement to Ikigai, the Theories of Happiness, Martin Seligman’s PERMA model, or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory, which you find on the Designing Your Life and Designing Your Work-Life Books.

This is not a “Millenial Fad”, it’s psychological research derived from Maslow’s pyramid.