Frederick Herzberg papers, 1950-1995

Frederick Herzberg, the father of job enrichment and one of the major management philosophers of our time, was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on 18 April 1923 to Lewis and Gertrude Copleman Herzberg and educated in the New York public school system. His studies in psychology at the City College of New York were interrupted by the second World War and he served in the United States Army from 1943-1946. Fluent in both German and Yiddish, Herzberg was involved in the relocation of internees of the Dachau Concentration Camp. This experience, where he "realized that a society goes insane when the sane are driven insane," was the matrix from which Herzberg's philosophy developed. His work, which stresses the nourishment of human character in the workplace, is directed toward "keeping the sane, sane." After receiving his B.S. from CCNY in 1946, Herzberg moved on to the University of Pittsburgh, where he was first lecturer, then instructor, while working toward his graduate degrees. He was awarded an M.S. in Clinical and Industrial Psychology in 1949, with his Ph.D. following a year later. Herzberg was the research director for Psychological Services of Pittsburgh from 1951 to 1957. In 1957 he became a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. During this time he also served as director of the graduate program in industrial mental health. Herzberg's first book, Job Attitudes: Research and Opinion, was published in 1957. This book was the outgrowth of his work in the 1950s, when he conducted a number of employee morale surveys with apparently contradictory results, which prompted him to rethink the traditional approach in measurement of job satisfaction. The Motivation to Work, Herzberg's controversial challenge to the industrial psychology establishment which questioned the validity of traditional attitude-measurement techniques, followed in 1959. Herzberg was awarded a Fulbright research fellowship in 1963-64 which took him to Finland. An inquiry about his theories led Herzberg to travel to the Soviet Union on a tourist visa and resulted in a long and productive relationship with colleagues in the Soviet Union. Herzberg's Work and the Nature of Man, recently named one of the 10 most important books on management in the 20th century, was published in 1966. In 1972 Herzberg accepted an offer from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and became distinguished professor of management in the college of business. In addition to teaching and writing, Herzberg spent the next twenty years consulting with government and industry leaders throughout the world. He developed seminars and workshops to train managers and employees at all levels. Herzberg retired from the University of Utah in 1995.