Higher Order Need Strength Measure B

Abstract

The Higher Order Need Strength Measure B is a standardized psychometric instrument developed by J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham as Section 7 of the Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS). Designed to assess an individual employee’s desire for personal growth, self-direction, intellectual challenge, and achievement in their occupational role—conceptually known as Growth Need Strength (GNS)—this measure employs a 12-item forced-choice (or paired-comparison) behavioral preference format. Unlike its counterpart, Measure A (which relies on direct, absolute Likert ratings of personal desires), Measure B requires respondents to weigh growth-oriented job attributes against competing lower-order occupational factors, including extrinsic compensation, job security, pleasant working conditions, and interpersonal collegiality. Each item presents a pair of contrasting hypothetical work situations (Option A versus Option B) rated along a 5-point continuum ranging from Strongly Prefer A (1) to Strongly Prefer B (5). Psychometric evaluations across diverse industrial cohorts encompassing blue-collar, white-collar, and managerial personnel indicate an internal consistency reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) of 0.71, accompanied by demonstrated construct, convergent, and criterion-related validity. In organizational psychology and work redesign research, Measure B functions predominantly as an individual-difference moderator within the Job Characteristics Theory, forecasting the degree to which complex, enriched work environments translate into enhanced internal work motivation, high-quality performance, and job satisfaction.

Keywords

Growth Need Strength, Job Diagnostic Survey, Higher Order Needs, Job Characteristics Model, Work Redesign, Hackman and Oldham, Job Enrichment, Work Motivation, Psychometrics, Forced-Choice Scale, Person-Environment Fit

Authors

The instrument was conceived and validated by two seminal figures in industrial and organizational psychology:

• J. Richard Hackman, Ph.D. (1940–2013): Formerly the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University, and previously a faculty member in the Department of Administrative Sciences and Psychology at Yale University. Hackman conducted pioneering research on team dynamics, work design, and leadership effectiveness.
• Greg R. Oldham, Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and previously on the faculty of the Department of Administrative Sciences at Yale University. Oldham is renowned for his empirical investigations into employee motivation, workplace creativity, contextual work performance, and organizational design.

The initial conceptualization and field validation were conducted under the auspices of the Department of Administrative Sciences at Yale University, supported by the Manpower Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor and the Office of Naval Research.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Higher Order Need Strength Measure B is to assess an employee’s latent craving for internal psychological growth, autonomous self-determination, and personal mastery within work environments. In the framework of job enrichment, organizational researchers observed that interventions aimed at expanding autonomy, skill variety, and task significance did not yield universally positive psychological and behavioral outcomes across all demographic or individual profiles. While many workers responded to enriched job designs with heightened motivation, lower absenteeism, and enhanced job performance, others exhibited indifference, stress, or psychological withdrawal.

Hackman and Oldham posited that an individual’s psychological need profile serves as a vital boundary condition or moderator governing responses to task characteristics. The purpose of Measure B is to isolate this individual difference using an ipsative or quasi-ipsative paired-comparison technique. By forcing individuals to trade off higher-order workplace affordances (e.g., opportunities for creative expression, cognitive challenge, and strategic decision-making) against foundational lower-order rewards (e.g., substantial compensation, organizational stability, fringe benefits, and amicable peer relations), the instrument circumvents the pervasive ceiling effects and social desirability biases common in direct self-report surveys.

In applied organizational development, Measure B serves three operational purposes:

• Diagnostic Pre-Intervention Assessment: Assisting industrial engineers and human resource professionals in determining whether a target workforce possesses the psychological readiness required to thrive under expanded, enriched, and decentralized job architectures.
• Person-Job Fit Optimization: Facilitating strategic selection, placement, and internal career pathing by aligning roles characterized by high Motivating Potential Scores (MPS) with individuals demonstrating elevated higher-order need strength.
• Empirical Research and Theory Testing: Providing organizational scholars with an operationalized moderator variable to investigate interaction effects in structural equation models linking core job dimensions to critical psychological states and subjective or objective work outcomes.

Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct evaluated by Measure B is Growth Need Strength (GNS), defined as the psychological potency of an individual’s desire for personal development, learning, self-direction, creativity, and self-actualization within their vocational life. Growth Need Strength represents an occupational translation of the upper echelons of hierarchical motivation models, directly contrasting higher-order psychological needs with lower-order extrinsic and relational needs.

The Dual-Domain Conceptualization

Measure B explicitly juxtaposes two primary dimensions of workplace motivation:

• Higher-Order (Growth) Needs: This dimension encompasses psychological aspirations related to autonomy, competence, intellectual engagement, and self-expression. Specific facets embedded across the paired items include:
  • Participation in Decision-Making: The desire to influence operational procedures, strategic goals, and organizational policies.
  • Skill Utilization and Expansion: The appetite for complex work that leverages existing capabilities while demanding continuous acquisition of novel proficiencies.
  • Freedom and Independence: A preference for structural autonomy, self-scheduled tasks, and discretion over work methods without intrusive managerial supervision.
  • Challenge and Innovation: A longing to solve non-routine, ambiguous, or demanding problems requiring divergent thinking and creative solutions.
• Lower-Order (Extrinsic and Social) Needs: This dimension comprises foundational contextual elements often categorized in organizational literature as hygiene or maintenance factors, including:
  • Extrinsic Compensation and Benefits: High wage levels, generous fringe benefits, and paid time off.
  • Job Security and Stability: Freedom from organizational insolvency, layoff threats, or arbitrary dismissal.
  • Interpersonal Affiliation: Collegial, warm, and supportive peer relationships, alongside avoidance of social isolation.
  • Considerate and Respectful Supervision: Protection from harsh, humiliating, or hypercritical administrative oversight.

By contrasting these domains through structured scenarios, Measure B measures need strength not as an unconstrained absolute value, but as a deliberate value preference. When an individual demonstrates high GNS on Measure B, it does not imply that financial compensation or supportive coworkers are entirely unimportant to them; rather, it indicates that when forced to navigate occupational trade-offs, the individual prioritizes intellectual challenge, creative agency, and personal growth over marginal increments in extrinsic comfort or security.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical foundations of Higher Order Need Strength Measure B stem from the convergence of several major theories of human motivation, most notably the Job Characteristics Theory (JCT) formulated by Hackman and Oldham (1975, 1976), which in turn synthesizes principles from Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Frederick Herzberg’s Two-Factor Motivation-Hygiene Theory, and Self-Determination Theory precursors.

Maslow’s Need Hierarchy and Occupational Adaptation

Maslow posited that human needs are organized in a hierarchy of prepotency, progressing from physiological and safety needs through social belonging and esteem to self-actualization. Hackman and Oldham adapted this continuum to modern organizational contexts. Lower-order needs reflect prepotent physiological safety and social maintenance requisites, whereas higher-order needs correspond to esteem and self-actualization. Measure B operationalizes the point of transition where an individual worker moves beyond seeking mere security and social accommodation to actively seeking personal self-actualization via daily labor.

Herzberg’s Dual-Factor Foundations

Herzberg’s Motivator-Hygiene theory asserted that extrinsic hygiene factors (such as compensation, company policy, and working conditions) prevent job dissatisfaction but cannot foster genuine psychological motivation. True motivation is generated strictly by motivator factors intrinsic to the work itself (such as achievement, recognition, responsibility, and advancement). Measure B embodies this dichotomy by explicitly pairing Herzbergian hygiene factors (pay, benefits, considerate supervision, physical conditions) against intrinsic motivator factors (decision-making responsibility, opportunity to learn, creative expression).

The Moderation Hypothesis within Job Characteristics Theory

Within the formal JCT architecture, five core job dimensions (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and job feedback) elicit three critical psychological states: experienced meaningfulness of the work, experienced responsibility for work outcomes, and knowledge of the actual results of work activities. These psychological states subsequently generate personal and work outcomes: high internal work motivation, high-quality work performance, high satisfaction with the work, and low absenteeism and turnover.

Hackman and Oldham hypothesized that Growth Need Strength acts as an indispensable moderator across this causal chain:

1. First-Stage Moderation: GNS moderates the linkage between the objective/perceived job characteristics and the experiencing of critical psychological states. Individuals with elevated GNS are psychologically attuned to perceive and capitalize on enriched task characteristics, readily deriving meaningfulness and responsibility from them.
2. Second-Stage Moderation: GNS moderates the linkage between the critical psychological states and the resultant behavioral/affective outcomes. When experiencing meaningfulness and responsibility, individuals high in GNS convert those subjective states into self-sustaining internal motivation, whereas individuals low in GNS may feel overwhelmed or indifferent.

Validity

Empirical validation of the Higher Order Need Strength Measure B has been documented in organizational psychology literature through multiple validation paradigms.

Construct and Convergent Validity

In their benchmark psychometric validation across 15 organizations and over 1,500 employees, Hackman and Oldham (1974, 1975) investigated the convergent validity of Measure B by comparing it with Measure A (the 6-item “would like” Likert-scale format). Despite differing response formats—Measure A being an unconstrained absolute rating scale and Measure B a forced-choice paired-comparison scale—the two measures demonstrated a statistically significant convergent correlation (typically ranging from r = .40 to r = .55 across diverse job types). This confirms that both instruments tap the same latent Growth Need Strength construct while capturing distinct facets of cognitive appraisal.

Subsequent investigations by Dunham (1976), Stone (1976), and Aldag and Brief (1979) established convergent validity with related individual-difference measures, demonstrating significant positive correlations with the Need for Achievement (nAch) scale of Jackson’s Personality Research Form and positive associations with intrinsic work value orientations, while maintaining low correlations with external locus of control.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity analyses indicate that Measure B is empirically distinguishable from demographic variables such as chronological age, organizational tenure, educational attainment, and baseline intelligence. While modest positive correlations have occasionally been observed between educational attainment and higher-order need strength (reflecting broader socialization experiences), factor analyses confirm that Measure B does not load on generalized cognitive ability or negative affectivity dimensions.

Predictive and Moderating Validity

The primary criterion for the validity of Measure B is its capacity to moderate relationships between job characteristics and employee outcomes. In their foundational 1975 study, Hackman and Oldham demonstrated that for individuals in the upper quartile of GNS scores (scores above 3.00), correlations between the job’s Motivating Potential Score (MPS) and overall job satisfaction reached r = .43 (p < .01), and correlations between MPS and internal work motivation reached r = .38 (p < .01). Conversely, among individuals in the lower quartile of GNS scores, these relationships diminished to statistically nonsignificant levels (r = .15 and r = .11, respectively).

Additional empirical support was provided by Pastor and Erlandson (1982), who examined secondary public school educators and confirmed that higher-order need strength significantly moderated the path from perceived job enrichment to job satisfaction. Similarly, Cameron (1984) and Katz (1978) verified that GNS interacted with organizational tenure and supervisory styles to predict professional engagement, demonstrating that employees with elevated GNS derived greater utility from supportive, growth-oriented clinical supervision than did employees with lower need strength.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Higher Order Need Strength Measure B has been documented across multiple industrial and academic samples:

Internal Consistency

Because Measure B utilizes a forced-choice format pairing disparate psychological dimensions (growth needs paired variously with compensation, safety, supervision, and social integration), its internal consistency is naturally lower than that of homogeneous Likert scales. In the normative sample of 1,500 employees across 100 distinct jobs, Hackman and Oldham (1974, 1975) reported a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.71 for Measure B. This meets standard psychometric thresholds for exploratory and diagnostic instruments, especially considering the ipsative nature of the paired alternatives.

In independent field investigations, comparable internal consistency estimates have been observed:

• Dunham (1976) obtained Cronbach’s alphas ranging from 0.68 to 0.73 across varied employee functional strata.
• Aldag and Brief (1979) reported an internal consistency reliability of 0.70 in an administrative and manufacturing sample.
• Pastor and Erlandson (1982) reported a reliability coefficient of 0.72 among professional public school personnel.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability evaluations of the JDS over intervals ranging from 6 to 12 months have yielded test-retest reliability coefficients for Measure B between r = .58 and r = .68. These values indicate that while Growth Need Strength behaves predominantly as an enduring psychological trait, it retains a degree of state-like sensitivity capable of evolving gradually in response to prolonged career socialization, major life transitions, or chronic shifts in workplace conditions.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Job Diagnostic Survey has been scrutinized using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Structure

When the 12 items of Measure B are analyzed independently using principal axis factoring with orthogonal or oblique rotations, they consistently load onto a single dominant latent factor accounting for between 28% and 36% of the common item variance. This overarching factor reflects the Relative Preference for Growth versus Hygiene Factors.

Items such as Item 1 (Pay vs. Creativity), Item 2 (Decision-Making vs. Pleasant Coworkers), Item 7 (Respectful Supervisor vs. Learning Opportunities), Item 9 (Skill Advancement vs. Vacation/Benefits), and Item 11 (Teamwork vs. Skill Utilization) display the strongest primary factor loadings, typically ranging from .48 to .67. Conversely, items framed in negative terms (e.g., Item 4: Company Closing vs. No Say in Procedures; Item 8: Threat of Layoff vs. Lack of Challenge; Item 10: Lack of Freedom vs. Poor Physical Conditions) exhibit moderate loadings (ranging from .35 to .52), occasionally yielding a minor secondary artifactual factor reflecting item valence (positive versus negative phrasing).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

In structural equation modeling analyses of the full JDS, the Growth Need Strength construct is modeled as a distinct latent variable separate from Core Job Characteristics, Experienced Psychological States, and Affective Work Outcomes. Confirmatory factor models specifying a single higher-order need latent dimension for Measure B yield acceptable goodness-of-fit indices when accounting for correlated uniqueness between similarly framed items (e.g., Comparative Fit Index [CFI] > .91; Tucker-Lewis Index [TLI] > .89; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] < .06; Standardized Root Mean Square Residual [SRMR] < .05).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Higher Order Need Strength Measure B (Job Diagnostic Survey, Section 7)
• Authors: J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham (1974)
• Format: Forced-choice, paired-comparison self-report questionnaire
• Number of Items: 12 paired items (each comparing Option A against Option B)
• Administration Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes
• Target Population: Adult working populations across industrial, administrative, professional, and technical sectors
• Response Continuum: 5-point bipolar preference scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Prefer A
  • 2 = Slightly Prefer A
  • 3 = Neutral
  • 4 = Slightly Prefer B
  • 5 = Strongly Prefer B
• Scoring and Directionality:
  • Each item is engineered such that one option represents a higher-order growth need (or avoidance of a growth deficit) and the other option represents a lower-order need (or avoidance of a lower-order deficit).
  • Prior to calculating the mean, items are scored or recoded so that higher numerical values (e.g., values toward 5) consistently indicate selection of the higher-order growth alternative.
  • Composite Score Calculation: The respondent’s score is computed as the arithmetic mean of all 12 items.
  • Interpretation Benchmark:
    • Score > 3.00: Indicates a predominance of higher-order (growth) need choices over lower-order concerns.
    • Score = 3.00: Represents an exact balance or neutrality between higher-order and lower-order occupational needs.
    • Score < 3.00: Signifies a predominance of lower-order (hygiene, security, pay, relational) choices over growth opportunities.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Higher Order Need Strength Measure B was first published in 1974 as part of the Job Diagnostic Survey within Technical Report No. 4 by the Department of Administrative Sciences at Yale University, and subsequently published in the peer-reviewed literature in 1975 in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Because the initial research was funded by public research grants from the U.S. federal government (Department of Labor and Office of Naval Research), the instrument was placed in the public domain for academic, research, and non-commercial organizational development purposes.

Researchers and practitioners may utilize, reproduce, and adapt the measure without payment of licensing fees or royalties, provided proper academic attribution is accorded to Hackman and Oldham. Commercial deployment within proprietary software suites or commercial assessment platforms may require permission from the copyright holders of the original publishing journals or the authors’ estates.

References

• Aldag, R. J., & Brief, A. P. (1979). Task design and employee motivation. Scott, Foresman & Co.
• Cameron, G. J. (1984). The effects of clinical and traditional supervision methods on the satisfaction levels of higher and lower-order need teachers (Doctoral dissertation, University of San Diego). ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
• Dunham, R. B. (1976). The measurement and dimensionality of job characteristics. Journal of Applied Psychology, 61(4), 404–409. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.61.4.404
• Hackman, J. R., & Lawler, E. E. (1971). Employee reactions to job characteristics. Journal of Applied Psychology, 55(3), 259–286. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0031152
• Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1974). The Job Diagnostic Survey: An instrument for the diagnosis of jobs and the evaluation of job redesign projects (Technical Report No. 4). Yale University, Department of Administrative Sciences.
• Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1975). Development of the Job Diagnostic Survey. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(2), 159–170. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076546
• Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7
• Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1980). Work redesign. Addison-Wesley.
• Katz, R. (1978). Job longevity as a situational factor in job satisfaction. Administrative Science Quarterly, 23(2), 204–223. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392563
• Pastor, M. C., & Erlandson, D. A. (1982). A study of higher order need strength and job satisfaction in secondary public school teachers. Journal of Educational Administration, 20(2), 172–183. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb009859
• Stone, E. F. (1976). The moderating effect of work-related values on the job scope-job satisfaction relationship. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 15(2), 147–167. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90034-9

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)