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

Job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not the obverse of each other... The opposite of job satisfaction would not be job dissatisfaction, but rather would be no job satisfaction. Similarly, the opposite of job dissatisfaction is no job dissatisfaction, not satisfaction with one's job.

All the basic satisfiers, recognition, achievement, advancement, responsibility, and work itself, appeared with significantly greater frequencies in the highs than they did in the low sequences of-events.