How to Motivate Employees: What Research Is Telling Us

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Lazenby, Scott
Copyright Year	2008
Abstract	22 I n his classic Harvard Business Review article, “One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees,” author Frederick Herzberg (1968) asserted that the way to motivate employees was to enrich their jobs. He wrote that they would perform better and do more if they were challenged intellectually, and they would get more psychological satisfaction from their work. But many managers have found that not all employees want to have their jobs enriched; many would prefer to do fairly routine and repetitive tasks, and intellectual challenges cause them stress. I have to admit that on some days, when problems are coming at me from every direction, my own job could use a little less enrichment. If I had a choice, for that little while I would escape from the office and mow the grass in the city’s parks. Experienced managers have found that a one-size-fits-all approach to employee motivation doesn’t work. Challenges that motivate one person might actually discourage another. Some individuals seem to have a high need for praise and recognition, even when their work is mediocre; others don’t seem to care about those things. Job enrichment does work for some people, in some situations. But how do we know when it will work, and what works for the other people and the other situations?
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Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article