Supervisors' Gratitude and Employees' Feelings About Their Supervisor and Organization.

McKeon, Emma J.; Trumbull, Kayla M.; Hughes, Jennifer L.

A 2012 survey by the John Templeton Foundation found that a majority of employees said they would feel better about themselves and that they would work harder for a supervisor who was more grateful (Kaplan, 2012). These findings prompted the present study in which we investigated whether employees' perceptions of their supervisors' expressed gratitude were predictors of employees' perceived organizational support, perceived supervisor support, affective organizational commitment, and job satisfaction. We used MTurk to recruit participants and they took online surveys. Using data from 278 respondents, we ran a series of linear regressions. We found that the perception of gratitude expressed by a direct supervisor positively predicted perceived organizational support (ß = .64, p = .001, adjusted R² = .41), perceived supervisor support (ß = .82, p = .001, adjusted R² = .67), affective organizational commitment (ß = .62, p = .001, adjusted R² = .38), and job satisfaction (ß = .50, p = .001, adjusted R² = .25). Our results imply that supervisors who express gratitude could increase employees' positive feelings about their workplace and supervisors.

GRATITUDE; SUPERVISORS; ORGANIZATIONAL commitment; JOB satisfaction; EMOTIONS

Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research, 2020, Vol 25, p272

2164-8204

Academic Journal

10.24839/2325-7342.JN25.3.272