verging_on_random

Hertzberg and the next election

February 8, 2007 on 7:53 pm | In Uncategorized |

I have a lot of fun applying management concepts and theories to politics. One of the problems that can arise from putting scholars in narrow academic disciplines is a tendency not to see the wood for the trees. As a mercenary-without-portfolio I like to think that sometimes I can take a multi-disciplinary perspective that might escape a few of my colleagues.

One example that came to me today is the relevance of motivation theory to voter behaviour. You’d be surprised at how little reliable data exists about why people vote in elections the way they do, even though political parties would pay a king’s ransom to get it. It’s just too hard to develop a research methodology that will provide useful data. The same problem afflicts management studies, where we still don’t really know how to make employees work hard. However, there are numerous motivation theories that are partially supported by empirical data. It occurred to me that in some respects, voters at elections might behave in a similar way to employees at work.

One of the most well-known motivation theorists is Frederick Hertzberg. He suggested that employees are affected by two different classes of motivating factors. In one category are the things that people only notice if they aren’t happy about them. Money falls into this category. If a worker doesn’t believe that s/he’s getting a fair wage, s/he will be de-motivated and work with less enthusiasm. But being satisfied with their wage won’t motivate an employee to try harder. Management can overcome this problem by offering even more money in return for greater effort but once the worker reaches the new, higher remuneration there’s no further motivating influence.

In other words, people aren’t motivated by what they’ve already got. They’re motivated by the opportunity to get something else they haven’t got yet.

Applying this to politics, it seems to me that Howard may no longer be able to influence voters by citing his economic record. Voters may have had it so good for so long that they no longer give politicians any credit for it at all. Economic growth and stability just are. When it comes to the next election, their interest will be on what the pollies can give them that they haven’t got yet.

If that’s right, Howard might be in trouble. The bag full of handouts that he’s relied on in the past mightn’t work any more. If people are so used to governments giving them tax cuts and new payments every year or two they might just take them for granted and go “Yeah yeah, we know we’ll get that from whoever we elect. What else you got?” And Howard’s mob don’t appear to have much else.

Labor, on the other hand, just might be able to win converts by appealing to the famous ‘hierarchy of needs’ proposed by another motivation theorist, Abraham Maslow. Maslow argued that people act to satisfy their goals in an ascending order - they wouldn’t worry about so-called ‘higher order’ needs until they had satisfied their ‘lower order’ needs. One of the most basic needs is security - the need to feel safe from personal harm. Arguably Howard’s mob have played on that need skilfully for years with the terrorism stuff but I don’t think that horse will run again. This time it might be Labor who presses the security need button by campaigning on global warming.

I can imagine a campaign in which a lot of people take economic well-being as a given - meaning WorkChoices won’t be the killer issue a lot of ALP supporters are counting on - and worry instead about threats to their health and security and even their kids’ lives from climate change. Such people will desert Howard in droves. If it turns out that way, we can maybe claim some modest insight from motivation theories that have stood the test of time.