Abstract
This study examined the role that employee perceptions of dispositional gratitude, state gratitude and institutionalized gratitude had upon job satisfaction. Employees (n = 171) completed measures of dispositional, state and institutionalized gratitude together with job satisfaction. Multiple Hierarchical Regression showed that state gratitude and institutional gratitude uniquely predict job satisfaction. The results have implications for the fields of positive organizational scholarship and positive organizational behavior and suggest that workplaces aiming to increase job satisfaction can do so through organizationally-based gratitude interventions and by institutionalizing gratitude into workplace culture.
Highlights
Gratitude is a universal human virtue (Emmons, 2003, 2007) that has been defined by Howell (2007) as “the active and conscious practice of giving thanks” (p. 12)
Job satisfaction was significantly correlated with dispositional gratitude, state gratitude and institutional gratitude
All three types of gratitude were positively correlated with job satisfaction
Summary
Gratitude is a universal human virtue (Emmons, 2003, 2007) that has been defined by Howell (2007) as “the active and conscious practice of giving thanks” (p. 12). Limited consideration has been given to the role of gratitude in an organizational context and the influence of gratitude on indicators of work well-being such as job satisfaction. Fisher’s (2010) recent review of employee happiness posited job satisfaction as one of the three top indicators of wellbeing at work. The intra-personal processes that link dispositional and state gratitude to job satisfaction are likely to be the cognitive and emotional mechanisms listed above such as the broaden and build process, the gratitude-coping link and the grateful schema (Wood et al, 2010). The current study adds to the gratitude literature in two important ways: 1) it empirically tests the relationship between dispositional and state gratitude with job satisfaction, and 2) it examines the relationship between employee perception of institutional gratitude and job satisfaction. Hypothesis 2: Institutional gratitude will have significant predictive variance upon job satisfaction above dispositional gratitude and state gratitude
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