The current study offers managers/practitioners a case application of Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene (two-factor) theory to better understand factors influencing employee sentiment and turnover.
A sample of anonymous employee reviews was identified for a set of government-funded universities known to have high levels of employee turnover. These reviews were extracted from an employer review website. These reviews were categorized and coded through the theoretical framework of Herzberg’s two-factor theory. Results offer significant insights into the factors influencing employee affect within the selected organizations and how these factors relate to faculty turnover.
The key factors that positively influence employee sentiment are the hygiene factors of salary and benefits, interpersonal relationships and physical working conditions. The key factors that negatively influence employee sentiment are the hygiene factors of company policies and administration, supervision and job security and the motivation factor of nature of the job. Employee feedback is mostly centered on hygiene factors, suggesting that the focal organizations lack the workplace foundations needed to avoid employee dissatisfaction. Results suggest that managers should improve basic hygiene factors before any attempts to improve levels of employee engagement and motivation.
Traditional methods of employee feedback, such as employee surveys and exit interviews, can be unreliable in a low-trust context. This unreliability hinders managerial understanding of and solutions to organizational issues. The paper highlights how anonymous public data can be a useful alternative data source to inform managerial insights and decision making and how the practical application of management theory (i.e. motivation-hygiene theory) can provide structure and meaning to this data to inform managerial priorities and policies.
The value in this paper is in the illustration of the generalizability of the application of two-factor theory as a practical tool to help management practitioners organize and interpret employee data. This can be used to support evidence-based solutions to real-world problems such as employee turnover.
