I've seen a lot of talk recently about the importance of attitude over other factors in employees and of course, this is nothing new.  When it comes to performance of people in the different processes that occur in business, a better more accurate and powerful way to look at it is suitability.  Suitability, typically encompasses the traits that underlie most of what determines a person's level of performance in a job or task.  These include a person's key personality traits and natural tendencies, work and task preferences, motivations, decision styles and attitudes.   

In knowledge/office  worker processes such as accounting, sales, administrative processes etc.,  not only are the people often like the machines in manufacturing processes, but they have considerable choice as to when and how they do many of the tasks and often whether they do them at all.  This is just one key reason why the underlying suitability traits of the person responsible for  steps in a knowledge/office  worker process  are essential determinants of that  process' performance.

Consider Enjoyment Performance Theory which is generally accepted as one explanation of human behavior. It holds that if we enjoy something, over the course of our life we embrace it, improve on it and perform increasingly well on it. On the other hand, if we do not like it, we avoid it when we can, don't focus on it positively and tend to perform poorly in that area.   Consider the implications of this when someone has a crucial role in a process and they don't "enjoy" the activity and when they have many other activities i.e. processes that they can enjoy as part of their "job".

Another dimension of this issue involves our natural tendencies.  Let's say you have an analyst who is passed a task, as part of a knowledge/office  worker process, where  a high level of precision is required . If not done precisely ,  expensive errors  result affecting key customer relationships.  What happens when this person has tendencies to be careless with details?   That machine (person) performs the task rather poorly.  Do you think?

In all types of processes especially knowledge/office  worker processes, we believe managers fail to think through sufficiently and apply the tools to understand the people in the process.  Predictably, poor results are often seen but, unfortunately, the managers usually rationalize something else as the cause.

Our experience indicates that organizations of all types can achieve major productivity improvements, even a doubling of productivity, by  using the powerful tools now available for understanding and predicting the performance of your people.  Then, the key is to apply this understanding in the design of  process including the actual roles and people in it,  ensuring that  you put in controls to prevent the people or roles from being changed in the future as if this does not matter!