The Cultural Significance of Frederick Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory on the Ghanaian Society – Evidence From Public Senior High Schools in Ghana

This study sought to situate Herzberg’s motivation theories in the Ghanaian cultural perspective medium as a test of its global relevance with evidence from the Ghanaian educational sector. This study explored how cultural factors impacted employee motivation in Ghana through the two-factor theory of motivation and the relevance of intrinsic forms of motivation towards employees’ effectiveness and efficiency in the organization. This was to further determine the extent to which the two-factor theory was managed in Ghanaian organizations to drive performance. The study was a descriptive research design and was quantitative. The population for this study was staff of seven Senior High Schools across three regions in Ghana. These schools have 994 workers of both teaching and non-teaching staff across all seven schools, which were selected purposively in the Greater Accra, Western and Ashanti regions. The simple random method was used to sample 550 staff of all seven Senior High Schools as the sample size for the study. A questionnaire was the survey tool utilized to collect data for this investigation, which was self-designed with guidelines from cultural issues and motivation which were the main variables for this study. The research instrument was categorized into three sections, all in thirty-nine research items, which were outlined in a structured survey questionnaire which had closed ended questions. The three hypotheses for the study were tested using Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation (r). The findings showed that employees who have worked with their respective Senior High Schools for ten years and above were quite enormous, but this, however did not match with employee performance. Thus employees’ performance is independent from their length of stay in the organization. This implied that employee motivation must be tied to the cultural factors that pertain in Ghanaian Public Senior High Schools. Also, Ghanaian Senior High Schools must make available and accessible opportunities for growth, advancement and life-long work environments to promote long service and further draw a comprehensive educational policy to facilitate educational opportunities for employees to update their educational qualifications.