The Four States of an Organization as per Herzberg Motivation Theory or Two Factor Theory

As per the Two Factor theory, at any point of time, there are four states an organization or a team can find themselves in with respect to the Hygiene Factors and Motivational Factors

1. High Hygiene and High Motivation
2. High Hygiene and Low Motivation
3. Low Hygiene and High Motivation
4. Low Hygiene and Low Motivation

High Hygiene and High Motivation

This is the best and ideal situation for any organization or team. In this state employees are motivated to perform their best and they are little or no grievances.

High Hygiene and Low Motivation

This is a state, where employees have all the basic needs fulfilled and they are little or no grievances with respect to pay or working conditions. However, the work isn’t very interesting for the employees and they are just coming to work for their salary. Employees will move out if they find roles that pay as well as their current organizations and get a chance to work on interesting stuff.

Low Hygiene and High Motivation

In a Low Hygiene and High motivation situation, employees are highly motivated to come to work but they have a lot of unfulfilled grievances. A typical example is where employees are working on some very interesting technologies, but the pay is less compared to competitors or not in line with industry standards.

Low Hygiene and Low Motivation

This is the most undesirable situation for any organization or team. This is where employees are underpaid and the work is also uninteresting. Unless their grievances are addressed, employees start to leave the organization if the situations persist in this state.

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Applying Herzberg theory of Motivation to Demotivated Employees

There are various signs through which you can identify your employees are demotivated. Some of them are Low productivity, High attrition rate, frequent complaints about pay and working conditions, poor quality of service to your end customers or production of low-quality products, events of employee strikes, etc…

According to Herzberg’s Motivation theory, In a scenario as above, management should focus on rearranging work so that motivating factors can kick in. Job Rotation, Job Enlargement, Job Enrichment are the three strategies that employers could implement in situations like this to re-motivate already demotivated employees.

Important Limitations of Herzberg Motivation Theory

• This theory applies to white-collar workers only.
• It seems that this theory weighs employee satisfaction more than organizational goals. Further, it also does not provide any objective way to measure employee satisfaction.