Herzberg and Drucker - Management Theories

After the end of the Industrial Revolution, large corporations were beginning to grow in size and power in order to satisfy what seemed the endless demands for new goods and services. As corporations and labor forces grew, there was a need to develop a more systematic study of organization and management, known as management theory, the significant being Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management which involved the development of training workers through special incentives and compensation (Boone p.33). In general, early management scientists tended to believe that there was a single way to organize companies and manage employees. By the beginning of the 20th century, there were initial attempts for launching a systematic and scientific study of management; by the 1950’s, there were multiple books and articles focused on organization and management theory. Since then, a number of new paradigms, or models, concerning employee motivation and employee-employer relationships have aroused influencing the basic principles of modern management theory.

Literature Review: Herzberg and Drucker

Frederick Herzberg, a pioneer on management theory, is best known for his motivation-hygiene theory and work in job enrichment. In his article, One More Time: How do you Motivate Employees, Herzberg explores the past theories of motivation and development of the motivation-hygiene theory. The motivation-hygiene theory suggests “the factors involved in producing job satisfaction (and motivation) are separate and distinct from the factors that lead to job dissatisfaction” (Boone p.174). In others words, job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not the opposite of one another but rather two separate attitudes. Herzberg claims that managers should realize that people have a natural drive to avoid pain from the environment (in this case, the job environment) and a need to achieve and experience psychological growth (job content) so that managers can have productive, satisfied employees.

Herzberg concluded that extrinsic rewards, or hygiene factors, could never create real work motivation. The growth or motivational factors in a firm include achievement, recognition, responsibility, and advancement while the dissatisfaction -avoidance or hygiene factors consists of extrinsic factors such as administration, supervision, interpersonal relationships, working conditions and salary (Boone p.176). Thus, in attempting to enrich an employee’s job, it was necessary for management to reward and recognize personal contribution rather than just giving the employee the opportunity to growth. This school of thought is known as vertical loading was at the time thought of to be more rewarding to employees and increase productivity rather than horizontal loading, which did not concentrate on employees’ motivational factors.

Unlike Herzberg, who focused on employee recognition and rewards, Peter F. Drucker, a more recent influential figure in management theory, argued that in modern times, employees in a firm should be given the opportunity to grow and contribute to management and the decision-making process. In his article, Management’s New Paradigms, Drucker asserts that there are many assumptions about management that are out of date, including the ‘right way’ to manage people. Every worker place consists of different people that require different ways of being managed or led. Drucker also stresses that employees need to be treated as associates rather than subordinates.

In his book, Management Challenges in the 21st Century, Drucker mentions the possibility of team paradigms, which allows for more communication among employees and management. For example, Drucker mentions that one of the pioneers of management theory, Mary Parker Follett had her theories about leadership fail to have an immediate impact on management due to her assumption workers are not subordinated to their managers (Forbes p. 170). In her article, The Essential of Leadership, Follett focused on how groups in the workplace should communicate with one another in order to improve the decision-making process (Boone p.49). Follett realized that leadership did not consist of a manager dominating the actions of his or her employees but rather there were many requisites that were needed for successful leadership that required cooperation among a leader and his followers. Followers have the role to keep their leader in control of the situation by providing suggestions, informing the leader of any problems, and pointing out orders that need to be corrected. However, as Drucker pointed out, Follett’s ideas were beyond her time (Forbes p.170); the theories of leadership during her era said that the leaders lead because they had certain personal qualities that could not be learned while Follett pointed out that anyone could learn to be a leader (Boone