The Plus-and-Minus Theory of Living Happily
Courtesy of a psychologist’s book from 1959
On most days, I don’t shower to not feel dirty. I shower to feel clean. It may not sound like it, but there’s a difference.
Have you ever wasted away in bed for a few days until, at some point, you couldn’t stand your greasy hair anymore and lugged yourself into the shower? If so, by turning on the water, you took care of what Frederick Herzberg would have called “a hygiene factor” — pun present but not intended.
In his 1959 book The Motivation to Work, Herzberg, a clinical psychologist and professor, introduced a model of motivation called “the two-factor theory.” It stipulates that in order to feel happy in our jobs, two conditions must come together: a lack of dissatisfaction and a presence of satisfaction.
Hygiene factors are elements causing dissatisfaction when not tuned correctly, whereas motivators are elements causing satisfaction if present at all. Job safety is mostly a hygiene factor: You want to have confidence you can still show up at work tomorrow, but unless the economy’s in a recession, that’ll hardly make you jump with joy. Responsibility, on the other hand, is a motivator. A job without it where you do simple, repetitive tasks, can still be not-dissatisfying, but in order to take genuine pride in your…
