Supervisors’ Gratitude and Employees’ Feelings about their Supervisor and Organization

Manuscript accepted to submitted for publication in a special edition of the Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research.

“INDIVIDE Flexible Office Desk for Creative Working” by Yaron Tam, Verena Tam is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Abstract

Gratitude has been shown to be linked to many positive outcomes for individuals including psychological health and well-being, decreased physical stress, and reduced feelings of loneliness (O’Connell, O’Shea, & Gallagher 2016; Rash, Matsuba, & Prkachin, 2011; Wood, Froh, & Geraghty, 2010). On the other hand, increasing perceived organizational support (POS) and perceived supervisor support (PSS), has been shown to be effective in raising employees’ levels of job satisfaction, reducing employee turnover, and reducing employee absenteeism (Allen & McCarthy, 2016; Chan 2011; Chancellor, Layous, & Lyubomirsky, 2015; Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986; Eisenberger, Stinglhamber, Vandenberghe, Sucharski, & Rhoades, 2002). In the present study, we investigated the effects of supervisors’ expressed gratitude and various aspects of employees’ satisfaction. We hypothesized that employees whose supervisors express gratitude more frequently would report greater POS, PSS, affective organizational commitment (AOC), and job satisfaction, and that all four of these relationships would be stronger for older individuals. We used Amazon MTurk to recruit our participants. Participants (147 women, 131 men; Mage= 39.08) all lived in the United States and reported varying employment backgrounds, with 71.9% working for a for-profit company/business, 13.3% working for the local, state, or federal government, 10.4% working for a not-for-profit, tax-exempt, or charitable organization, and 4.7% reported being self-employed. We used five items from Meyer and Allen’s Affective Commitment Scale (Meyer & Allen, 1997; Meyer, Allen, & Smith, 1993) and one item from the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979) to assess AOC. The Gratitude Questionnaire-6 (GQ-6; McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002) was used to measure participants’ feelings of gratitude, and theMichigan Organizational Assessment Questionnaire-Job Satisfaction Subscale (MOAQ-JSS; Cammann, Fichman, Jenkins, & Klesh, 1979, 1983) was used to assess job satisfaction. To assess POS, we used the eight-item short form listed by Rhoades et al. (2001) from theSurvey of Perceived Organizational Support (SPOS; Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa., 1986, Eisenberger, Fasolo, & Davis-LaMastro 1990; Shore & Tetrick, 1991; Shore & Wayne, 1993), and an adapted form of those questions was used to evaluate PSS (i.e., the word “organization” was replaced with “supervisor” for four of the items). Using hierarchical regressions, we found that those who believed their direct boss expressed his or her gratitude reported greater POS (the model accounted for 40% of the variance, F(1, 275) = 192.10, p < .001), greater PSS (the model accounted for 61% of the variance, F(1, 274) = 564.95, p < .001), greater AOC (the model accounted for 38% of the variance, F(1, 271) = 171.25, p < .001), and greater job satisfaction (the model accounted for 26% of the variance, F(1, 274) = 95.22, p < .001). However, none of the variance was significantly accounted for by age in any of our regression models. Overall, we found that our hypotheses were supported, except we did not find the relationships to be age-dependent, and our results imply that supervisors who increase their expressed support could increase employees’ positive feelings about the workplace and their supervisors.

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