Abstract
Gratitude may be defined as a personal positive tendency to recognize and respond with gratitude to positive experiences. It has been extensively described within personal relationship literature, showing its correlations with life satisfaction and decreased psychopathology. We propose here to consider gratitude as both a personal and an organizational value able to improve job performance and job satisfaction. The specific aim is twofold: to explore how public administration workers are used to express and perceive gratitude in the workplace, and to validate a serial mediation model, in which dispositional, collective, and relational gratitude are predictors of job satisfaction and job performance. We have designed a mix-method study, with a survey and a diary study, choosing to collect data also on a daily basis because we were interested in gratitude exchanges in work contexts using the event-sampling data method. Nine employees from several Italian public administrations completed a gratitude diary for ten working days in the initial qualitative part of the study. Afterwards, a sample of 96 Italian public administration employees filled in a questionnaire with measures related to job satisfaction, job performance, and three dimensions of gratitude: dispositional, collective, and relational. Results confirm that the three types of gratitude are predictors of job performance and job satisfaction and this relation has been tested in a serial mediation model. This investigation on gratitude has practical implications for the planning of training interventions framed in the positive psychology context.
Highlights
In the field of positive psychology, some authors [1] have defined gratitude as a dispositional tendency, meant as a personality trait
Results confirm that the three types of gratitude are predictors of job performance and job satisfaction and this relation has been tested in a serial mediation model
Our study is in line with previous work [30], being conducted in Italian public administrations, related to organizational gratitude, and with the aim of identifying how different types of gratitude are related to job satisfaction and performance
Summary
In the field of positive psychology, some authors [1] have defined gratitude as a dispositional tendency, meant as a personality trait. The recent contribution by Di Fabio et al [5] related to gratitude in organizations represents the formalization of the construct framed in the context of positive psychology and psychology of harmony sustainability [6,7,8] These authors collected and analyzed several literature contributions in order to define the relevance of gratitude in different aspects of organizational life. One research study aimed at correlating gratitude and organizational constructs, such as job performance [9]; in this case, the authors included gratitude among many others values that contribute to the definition of organizational virtuousness Positive attitudes, such as gratitude, are often ignored in organizational life if they do not have a direct relationship with more concrete outcomes; several scholars [9,10] have demonstrated this relation thanks to two specific characteristics of general virtuousness. Our study is in line with previous work [30], being conducted in Italian public administrations, related to organizational gratitude, and with the aim of identifying how different types of gratitude are related to job satisfaction and performance
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