THE MOTIVATOR-HYGIENE THEORY AS EXAMPLE
On the basis of an exhaustive review of hundreds of early studies of the causes, correlates, and
consequences of job attitudes, Herzberg and his colleagues (Herzberg, Mausner, Peterson, &
Capwell, 1957) developed the preliminary hypothesis that the factors which cause positive attitudes
toward one’s job are different from the factors that generate negative job-related attitudes. This
hypothesis was revolutionary at the time because it implies that job satisfaction is not simply the
opposite of job dissatisfaction, as had commonly been assumed. Instead, the new hypothesis held
that feelings of job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are independent of one another, such that an
employee can be happy about some aspects of his job while being unhappy about others. Using the
terms shown in Figure 2.1, the problem of interest in this case was employee work attitudes, and the
observations that led to the preliminary hypothesis were actually the observations of hundreds of
other researchers and behavioral scientists – a much wider and more justifiable base for offering a
hypothesis than is usually the case in behavioral science