When Scott Tweedy picked up a magazine article on how to manage health care workers, he was pleased to fi nd some advice. Scott was concerned about poor or mediocre performance on the part of several respiratory therapists in his clinic. The author of the article said that the “best way to improve performance is to make your workers happy.”

Scott was glad to have read this and made a pledge to himself to start doing a much better job of making workers happy. But should Scott follow this advice? What do we know about the relationship between job satisfaction and performance, and how can this apply to the performance problems at Scott’s clinic?