In our first pilot study we talked with clerical and production workers as well as professional and managerial people. We discovered that the profess… - Frederick Irving Herzberg

In 1950, I received my PhD in psychology. I was offered a fellowship to attend the Graduate School of Public Health at the . My major was to be in industrial mental health under the direction of an industrial psychiatrist from McGill University in Canada by the name of Graham Taylor. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that the concepts of industrial mental health were really a restatement of the concepts of that I had previously studied in clinical and abnormal psychology. Reflecting this disappointment, I entitled my Public Health Practice thesis Mental Health Is Not the Opposite of Mental Illness. After receiving my master’s degree in public health, I took a job as research director for Psychological Services of Pittsburgh. A local industrialist came to see me after a nasty labor relations disturbance and asked me plaintively, ‘What do people want from their jobs?’ I answered him in typical academic fashion, ‘Sir, I don’t know but if you give me enough money I will find out.’. I followed up on my School of Public Health thesis by designing a study to test the hypothesis that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction were separate concepts. The result was the book, The Motivation to Work, which led to a fundamentally different approach to the study of people’s affective states.

If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do — an enriched job.

Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work... If you want people motivated to do a good job, give them a good job to do.