I had a short break in writing. It was a pretty busy time, which I devoted, among others, for writing an article for a scientific conference on participatory management. About the participatory management I will write some other time. But by the way I found some data that confirms my earlier arguments about the employees and what is important for the efficiency of the organization. As I claimed, knowledge, skills, and specific competencies of individual employees are important in building business efficiency, but not as much as relationship at work or specific psychological capacities of employee. Some studies suggests that the role of these factors, particularly explicit knowledge, may be overestimated. For example, meta analysis of the research in that field has revealed that on average, education has a predictive validity of 0.10 for job performance and experience only of 0.18*. Another meta-analysis of relevant research studies has shown, that positive feedback can enhance performance on average by 10%, and the social recognition (i. a. appreciation from supervisor or co-workers) can do it by 17%. This is true also for high-paying organizations, which rewards their people mostly with money; combined with contingent monetary reinforcement, positive feedback and social recognition increased performance by 45%. Money alone done it by only 23%. And when it comes to positive characteristics of employees ? eg. self-efficacy has a predictive validity of job performance of 0.38** Data is one thing and practice is another. However, in my opinion, in this case, the data reflect what the best managers have already known for a long time. * Harter, J. K. and Schmidt, F. L. (2000). Validation of a Performance-Related and Actionable Management Tool: A Meta-Analysis and Utility Analysis. Technical Paper, The Gallup Organization, Lincoln, NE.  ** Stajkovic, A. and Luthans, F. (1998). Self-Efficacy and Work-Related Performance: A Meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 240-261. Photo credit: koalazymonkey / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)