Patrick Lencioni's latest book discusses the topic of job satisfaction. A summary of this book and an interview with the author can be found on HBR's podcast. According to the author,the key factors for job satisfaction and thus performance are:
Anonymity- Employees are often miserable in their jobs because of anonymity. Quite simply, employees feel that they are transparent and unimportant. If they don't feel a personal connection, if they feel that their managers do not take a personal interest in them, they often do not like their jobs.
Relevance - Employees need to feel their jobs are relevant. If they don't feel they can positively impact others, or that their jobs have some meaning, they are often miserable.
Imeasurement - One's job performance needs to be measurable. Employees need to have some way for them to assess their own performance. In such case they are not dependent on a whim of a manager relative to performance appraisal. This is why salespeople are often happy in their jobs. It is because they have measurable evidence of their performance - sales.
