The study empirically examines the influences of compensation, organizational culture, and meritocracy on job satisfaction and their impacts on employee performance. All 155 employees at the District Secretariat of Pidie Jaya, Province of Aceh, Indonesia were taken as the sample of the study, thus using the census sampling technique. To gather the data, questionnaires were distributed to the respondents and analyzed using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique. Based on the SEM analysis, the study found that compensation and meritocracy affected positively job satisfaction, while organizational culture did not. On the other hand, except for meritocracy, compensation and organizational culture are also found to positively affect employee performance. Finally, job satisfaction is found to mediate significantly the influence of compensation and meritocracy on employee performance, whereas job satisfaction is found to mediate insignificantly the influence of organizational culture on employee performance. These findings showed that to improve employee performance, the emphasis should be given on increasing job satisfaction of employees by providing better compensation and meritocracy systems.