Going to work in the morning is related with happiness or at least a state of acceptance next to your job. You work 8 to 10 hours a day, you get paid, and then you get back to your life.

In the same time, job satisfaction is a necessary evil. Your existence is conditioned by the needs that you have and also the needs of those for which you are a provider. No matter how much we get, we want more. Is what drives us forward, being in the same time the root of our unhappiness.

No matter how much the organization does, in the end job satisfaction is a choice, an acceptance of your responsibilities with a reward that influences not if you go to work, but if you go to work at the same company next month.

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According to John Meyer and Natalie Allen there are three different types of organizational commitment:

Affective commitment is based on positive emotions. The employee is identifying with the organization. He also identifies with a good financial compensation, job satisfaction.

Continuance commitment is when you have no other choice but to stay. Leaving the company involves economic costs and social costs based. This type we are going to see more often these days.

Usually continuance organizational commitment was determined by being in the same company for years. Because people developed competencies that could be applied to new positions they started to move more often. Talented people were scarce. Now, with the “crisis”, jobs are scarce. Only for now …

Normative commitment is based on what you feel is right. You perceive as having an obligation and you stay with the organization because is the right thing to do. Loyalty is never overrated … is only underpaid.

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A manager is required to evaluate the performance of his/her subordinates, usually on a yearly basis. Their recommendation is the basis for an extra payment – the merit pay.

Merit pay plans allow to differentiate the high performers from the rest and to reward for a non repetitive task. Most researchers agree that they are not really working.  The main issue could be that the employee’ performance is judged in a subjective manner by the manager.

The lack of effectiveness comes from:

• Low discrimination distance. When there is no accurate measuring system in place, a manager will have the tendency to equalize the merit pay. This will make high performers unhappy, and low performers confused.
• Merit pay is too small. Because the merit pay is calculated as percentage from the salary, it will go unnoticed, and the level of satisfaction will not act as a motivator.
• Pay level is secret. Merit pay is too. Most of the companies in this world impose a policy of secrecy over wages, benefits and bonuses. I am sure that there arguments in favor of this. But, companies are made of people. When people do not know something they assume or invent. You can be sure that everybody will think that the other is paid better! Job satisfaction and motivation will decrease exponentially. If merit pay is kept secret, none of the employees will know who performs better and how much is performance paid with.

The methods of evaluating performance are evolving all the time. I think that, by now, there are enough objective criteria even to evaluate “the impossible to evaluate in numbers” white-collar employees’ performance. Merit pay could work only if managers give up their royal right of granting rewards and punishment based only on their subjective reasoning.

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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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The concern for motivation in the work environment has change the purpose of job design. Job satisfaction, performance, customer satisfaction, and quality of working life are the goals that must be accomplished through job design and the associated techniques: job enlargement, job enrichment, job rotation.

Job scope is defined as a combination of the number of different activities performed by an employee and the level of control that an employee has upon how to perform those activities.

A manager has a high scope job because he performs a large number of activities (see Management – art of controlling processes and outcomes) and has a broader or narrower decision-making power.

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Even if you would like your job to be something repetitive, with fixed hours and just breaking the door when the bell rings, you will still love a challenge. Why? It is called need of social recognition. We all have it.

The same need and the value we give to ourselves in a social context are reasons for which a promotion makes us happy.

Why the people around you are important? Maybe because you spend with them every day more time than you spend with your family?

When your job makes you happy there are a series of benefits for the organization:

• Absence from work – I am not talking about physical absence. If your mind is not there it does not matter if your body is.
• Turnover – replacement of employees is so expensive, that only morons do not care if their employees are happy.
• Performance & Organizational citizenship behavior – happy people walk the extra mile.
• Customer satisfaction – who does not love a smiley face?

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Management by Objectives (MBO) is an elaborate, systematic, ongoing program that helps employees to understand their objectives at organizational and personal level.

MBO principles:

1. Cascading of organizational goals and objectives
2. Specific objectives for each employee
3. Shared decision-making process
4. A predefined time framework
5. Performance evaluation and feedback

Advantages of MBO:

1. Motivation -employees’ involvement in the goal setting process increases job satisfaction and commitment
2. Better communication – the evaluation sessions and feedback are supposed to do that
3. Clarity of goals – SMART
   • Specific
   • Measurable
   • Achievable
   • Realistic
   • Time-related

From my experience with MBO, I can tell you that it did not work for me. Mostly because nowadays the manager that set the objectives often already works in a different company when time for the employee’s evaluation comes.

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