"Seniority (years of service) should not be the basis of employee compensation. Employees should be promoted and given raises solely on the basis of their work performance and merit. That is a better way to encourage high 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.
Whether the employee compensation should be based on work performance or on merit has always been a point of debate.Some people say that the more the experience an individual has the better he is able to solve critical problems and hence the more should be his appreciation and compensation . However , I believe merit rather than age should be a criterion for determining the employee compensation and therefore agree with the the given statement.
The main reason for my argument is that to neglect an inexperienced employee ideas or solutions to a problem on the argument that he has less experience i wrong.Some young employees may well present different ideas which may not come in the minds of experienced individuals .To say with certainty that a more experienced employee always has better ideas and hence is more useful to an organisation is wrong.
In addition young minds which are less used to the problems around are better able to detect them and provide solutions to them. For instance, if a person has been working in an organisation for past 25 years he becomes used to the problems present in the system.Furthermore,in such a long duration an employee generally settles in the position and fails to see the intrinsic problems which have been present in the system and hence must have learnt a way around the problem rather than tackling the issue head on and removing it . In such cases , to claim that an experienced employee is more productive than a less experienced person is flawed
Also if the sole basis of employee compensation is based on years of service rather than on merit then many employees will tend to become reluctant to do work . In other words,if there is no reward for a better working individual he tends assume a laid back attitude thinking that the progress of his career will be steady whether he works or not. In such a case it will the overall efficiency of the organisation will decrease as actual number of working hands will be too low.
In sum , to assume that higher productivity is always achieved through higher experience is questionable . The above mentioned arguments suggests that though a more experienced guy will be a useful employee for the company but to overlook the merit of an employee in lieu of his experience will cast severe problems for an organisation and may have detrimental consequences.
I am done with my GMAT and got an AWA score of 5.5