GMAT Issue Writing Sample 27

“A company’s long-term success is primarily dependent on the job satisfaction and the job security felt by the company’s employees.”

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.

27. I agree that job satisfaction is an important factor in determining whether a company will be successful in the long term. However, other factors typically play just as vital a role in the ultimate success or failure of a business. At the same time, job security is becoming decidedly unimportant for many employees and, in any event, often leads to substandard job performance.

I agree that business success is more likely when employees feel satisfied with their lobs. Employees who dislike the workplace or their jobs are not likely to reach their potential performance levels; they may tend to arrive late for work, perform their tasks in an unimaginative and sluggish manner, or take excessive sick leaves. Nevertheless, a firm's long-term success may equally result from other factors such as finding a market niche for products, securing a reputation for quality products and services, or forming a synergistic alliance with a competitor. This list hardly exhausts all the factors that can contribute to a firm's ultimate success, and no one of them—including job satisfaction—is pivotal in every case.

While job satisfaction clearly boosts employee morale and contributes to the overall success of a company, the same cannot be said for job security. Admittedly an employee worried about how secure his or her job is might be less creative or productive as a result. By the same token, however, too much confidence in the security of one's job can foster complacency, which, in turn, may diminish employees' creativity and productivity. Moreover, many employees actually place job security relatively low on the list of what they want in a job. In fact, more and more workers today are positively uninterested in long-term job security; instead, they are joining firms for the sole purpose of accomplishing near-term professional goals, then leaving to face the next challenge.

To sum up, the claim at issue overrates the importance of job satisfaction and security by identifying them as the key factors in a company's long-term success. Job satisfaction among employees is very important, but it is not clearly more important than many other factors. At the same time, job security is clearly less important, and even unimportant in some cases.