essay - GMAT: Issue 22

Job security and salary should be based on employee performance, not on years of service. Rewarding employees primarily for years of service discourages people from maintaining consistently high levels of productivity.

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion stated above. Support your views with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.

Answer:
In my country, Japan, lifetime employment, which is a system that employers hire employees until they retire even if the performance necessarily doesn't match the company's expectation, has prevailed for a long time. In the system, many companies and many employees have enjoyed long-term prosperity from the time of the defeat in the World War II. The advantages of the system are first to foster united atmosphere and then to maintain human resources in the company even at the time to be difficult to hire new people. Growing up in Japan, however, I agree with the opinion that a merit based evaluation system is superior to the lifetime employment.

The first reason why I think so is that the lifetime employment faces difficulty when the nation's economical state is entering into the phase of ressession. Since employers cannot easily dismiss or lay off the employees in the system by the nature, the profittability goes down owning to the high payroll costs. On the other hand, the other system such as a merit based system can quickly respond to such situation. In this sense, I strongly insists that companies should adopt other than the lifetime employment system.

What I think the most important in the performance based system is that the system can highten employees' motivation much more than the other systems such as a lifetime employment. As human nature, people do their best when the efforts are rewarded. Nobody can work alone; Everybody wants reward. Therefore, companies need to pay attention to the employees' performance as closely as possible, and give them reward if the performance matches or exceeds the company's expectation.

From my personal experience, working in a fast-changing industry, information technology industry, I feel that a merit based system is especially suitable for such kind of industry. I can observe that my motivation becomes extremly high when my achievements are rewarded and then my annual salary goes up.

To sum up, I believe that a system where employees are evaluated by their performance not by their age or the duration to work is much better than the other systems in terms of the agility that the company can acquire and the fitness for human nature. Although growing up in a country which is the most famous for the lifetime employment, I bet that a merit based evaluation system will survive as the best choice for every corporation.