Job satisfaction is personal experience, your overall attitude next to your job. An attitude is a combination of beliefs and values (see previous posts).

• The difference between what you get and what you think you should get from your job is called discrepancy
• The difference between what you get compared with what others are getting is called distributive fairness.
• Procedural fairness is a factor that relates with the way decisions that affect you are taken. It is important if you perceive them as reasonable and taken according to a procedure. But more important is if you were part of the decision-making process.
• Extroverted and conscientious people manifest a predisposition to be happy with their job, while other people have natural disposition to be unhappy about everything.

Maybe the most important determinant of job satisfaction remains our emotion and the way in which you identify, assess and manage them in a work environment. Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQ), even if you agree with its existence or not, is important even only for the fact that most of the people around you believe in it and modify their behavior in accordance with their knowledge.

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A simple sentence has triggered a complex process: Strategy is the way in which you reach your objectives. When I heard it my past experiences and knowledge have become pieces on a chessboard in a game where I know beforehand what moves my opponent will do.

Regardless of how much information and experience you accumulate the engine that will move you ahead depend on how you create connections between them.

Strategy remains a word said with reverence in business. Until now I have met 3 types of people who assume an expertise in what is called business strategy:

1. Unknowers – those who use the word strategy in contexts like “I do PR strategy”, etc. without understanding how much experience involves the assumption of such expertise. Usually these people gather with similar to them people and feed their vanity listening to each other speaking.
2. Conservators – those managers and business owners that apply with perseverance things applied 10 years ago without understanding that the terms used no longer exist or have a completely different meaning. Formal authority given by the assertion “I am the boss and I know best” spreads terror among subordinates who will bend over to do things as they should be done without upsetting the boss. Eventually profits will come and he / she will be proud of his strategic abilities and will be generous with kicking the lower backside of the slaves that worked for it.
3. I-want-to-be-like-him-when-I-grow-up People – those who aggregate intelligence, experience, common sense and care about those around them and which do not even bother to use the word strategy. They know that their experience is a foundation which can be build upon only if they have an attitude open to new and the consciousness that they are not always right.

Except those who are truly exceptional, for the rest of us to get success requires a lot of work and continuous learning. These are some minimum requirements. If success means not only money and social position, you need to be a genuine human being with real values for others to look at you like as to a model to follow.

The ability to understand the concept of strategy as well as its applicability in professional and personal life and in building your personal brand is obtained while gathering experience and continuous learning.

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There will always be a tendency to behave egalitarian in an effort to make people feel good. The level of hypocrisy involved makes it useless.

People feel the lie. If they are your employees they will despise you. If they are you superiors, you will get rejected. Your job is most times just a job. Define correctly your place, treat the other with respect and understand their place. Real value is real value. Even if people do not like you as a person, they will still respect you if you are true to yourself.

A team will evaluate its members based on two constructions: formal authority and informal status (respect).

The formal status is the etiquette used to make sense of the organization’s behavior. The value is given by the organization and is accepted by others based on the acceptance of their own status. An employee will listen to the manager that has a higher status because he perceives the higher value given by the company. Also his needs of moving up the company’s food chain is nourished by the existence of a superior position (hence motivation).

The informal status is a form of respect. It is given by the other team members only to those that are worthy and is mostly related to job performance.

Characterizations based on difference of gender are not a status. You will be surprised how easy a mentor can loose the attention of its followers only because she is a woman. The male employees have a beer-talk with the male boss who expressed his disappointed with woman getting pregnant and not performing. The little suck-ups node their empty heads in approval and behave accordingly.

Any employee has a tendency to communicate with peers or superiors. If the distance between the emitter and the receiver is perceived as too large, the communication process doesn’t happen.

A status barrier can be lifted in two ways:

• Create a grapevine communication system. The organization can be characterized as informal and this can be a disadvantage because it will affect the processes already in place.
• Define procedures for dealing with level of importance for issues and address them directly to the person that has the formal authority to say yes or no. That manager might not be your direct superior and you will have to take responsibility for the judgment call you make.

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I care mostly about the answer to one question: What’s in it for me?

The functions you achieve by understating attitudes relates to:

• Expressing values – your attitude allows you to express who you are and what you believe in.
• Ego-defensive – you project your internally-held conflicts on external subjects through you attitude.
• Knowledge – you “touch” the world
• Utilitarian function – it enables you to gain a reward and to avoid possible or perceived punishment

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Common sense has not much in common with science. The research in the human nature field of the professional life is extensive. And is normal to be so because, in a world where competencies rule, the real competitive advantage is given by the effective management of your employees.

It becomes vital for a company to explain, manage, and, most important, to predict the behavior of the organization as a whole and of each employee as a professional.

Explain. You can get busy with establishing rules for why things happened. The further you try to generalize the far you are from the real reason. When people are happy with their job, complain, refuse to perform or quit is easy to find an answer. Ask and more important LISTEN.

Manage. A manager is just an administrator of people, situation or inventory (this affirmation will be developed in other posts). Administration is the art of getting things done. No matter if it is a quick fix or a procrastinated decision process … things must happen for the organization to survive and adapt.

Predict. The study of organizational behavior combined with your own experience can give you knowledge about what was in the past and why. For the future you can be only ready … ready to listen. You need to listen to market, the decision makers in your company, but above all you need to listen:

• To those with whom you spend at least eight hours a day
• To your conscience

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A team justifies its existence only if it brings added value through numbers. That means if 1+1=3.

An employee has the tendency to ‘free-ride”. It is human nature.

Social loafing is an organizational behavior of an employee that makes less effort in a team compared with the way he behaves next to an individual task. The reason can be that he feels his contribution is not correctly evaluated, but what allows this behavior to happen is that the employee knows he is not evaluated.

There are a lot of preventive measures ranging from establishing individual accountability to peer evaluation or writing a team contract. The only question remains who will implement these measures? A functional manager will not have sufficient authority due to the fact that team members can be from different departments. The only approach that proves to be efficient is using a project manager or a team leader that has basic knowledge of organizational behavior.

The key to avoid social loafing seems to be not to develop the sense of community that is expected from a team member, but to define better the individual tasks of the respective employee. Being part of the team is motivating as long as “I am a member of this team” and not so much when “we are a team”.

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