The role of gratitude in the workplace and its relationship with job satisfaction.

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2020-06-08
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en
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This experimental study investigated the relationship between spoken, written, and no gratitude and employee job satisfaction. By means of an online experiment, the researchers created three participant groups of people with working experience in the Netherlands. All participants had to perform a task where they were asked to match a flag of a country or continent to its belonging country or continent. After the task, the three groups received different forms of gratitude for their effort: one group received spoken gratitude (thank you for your participation), the other group received written gratitude (thank you for your participation), and the control group did not receive a thank you message. Finally, all groups had to answer one question in a questionnaire in Qualtrics about the enjoyability of the task. The idea was to check whether the different forms of gratitude caused differences in the degree of task/job satisfaction experienced by the participants. The results indicated that the group that received spoken gratitude reported significantly higher task enjoyment than the group that received written gratitude. However, no significant difference was found between whether a group received gratitude for their work (either spoken or written gratitude) or no gratitude. The results of this study could lend some tentative support for the idea that spoken gratitude might be preferred in the workplace over written gratitude. HR managers could use these finding wisely when creating new gratitude interventions in institutional settings.
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