INCENTIVE SYSTEMS FOR THE FURTHER EDUCATION OF N.S.W. HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS: AN INITIAL ANALYSIS
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb009812 |
| Date | 01 January 1979 |
| Pages | 106-109 |
| Published date | 01 January 1979 |
| Author | MICHAEL HOUGH,ROSS I. HARROLD |
| Subject Matter | Education |
106
Notes on
Theory and Research
INCENTIVE SYSTEMS FOR THE FURTHER EDUCATION OF
N.S.W. HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS: AN INITIAL ANALYSIS
MICHAEL HOUGH AND ROSS I. HARROLD
A societal and educational analysis established the perspective that Australian teachers are
working in a context of societal change, with concomitant pressures on their traditional
approaches and methods. Further education was seen as a major method of assisting
teachers to meet these pressures, and the study addressed the problem of developing policies
to induce significant numbers of teachers to undertake further education.
The approach adopted was based on Herzberg motivation — hygiene theory1, and in
particular the concept that workers can be categorized according to their overall orientation
towards work, as either motivation seekers or hygiene seekers.2 The study used an im-
portant extension of Herzberg's work provided by Hackman,3 who stated that long term
organizational effectiveness depends upon the matching of the psychological characteristics
of employees to their job characteristics.
Accordingly, the study incorporated the following theoretically supported assumptions:—
(a) that teachers should not be thought of
as a
single group for incentive system purposes4,
(b) that teacher psychological "types" were instrumentalists, closure or responsibility
seekers (forms of motivation or hygiene seekers suggested by Hackman5),
(c) that teacher job groupings were: classroom teacher, the subject specialist teacher;
administrator6
(d) the inequity model of teacher job satisfaction published in
1975
by
Cecil
Miskel.7
The study therefore assumed Hackman's "matching" concept, to develop a generator
model of teacher "types", in which each "type" represented a psychological type matched to
a job characteristic e.g. the administrator responsibility seeker. This generator model is
shown diagramatically in Fig. 1.
MICHAEL H. HOUGH is Lecturer, School of Teacher Education, Riverina College of
Advanced Education. ROSS I. HARROLD is Lecturer in the Economics of Education,
Centre for Administrative Studies, University of New England.
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