Gratitude: The Psychology Behind Appreciation at Work

Gratitude is not what most people think it is.

When organisations talk about gratitude, they tend to mean something rather thin: say thank you more, write in your gratitude journal, appreciate what you have. This isn’t what real gratitude, the kind that actually changes how people think, relate, and work, is.

What Gratitude Actually Is

In psychological terms, gratitude operates on at least two levels:

1. State gratitude: the momentary emotional response to receiving a benefit from another person, and
2. Trait gratitude: a more stable dispositional tendency to notice, appreciate, and respond to the positive aspects of one’s experience.

The distinction matters. Most workplace interventions target state gratitude (trying to make people feel thankful in the moment), but deeper benefits tend to come from trait gratitude, which develops over time and through genuine shifts in attention and meaning-making.

Gratitude also has both affective and cognitive dimensions.

• The affective component:  the warm, appreciative feeling that arises when one recognises a benefit received, and
• The cognitive component: the appraisal that something good has happened, that an external source is at least partly responsible, and that the benefit was given with some degree of intentionality or goodwill.

There is also a strong argument to be made that gratitude should be understood as a life orientation rather than merely an emotion. That life orientation encompasses appreciation for what one has, a sense of abundance, recognition of contributions from others, and an awareness of the fleeting nature of positive experiences.

The Research Base

The empirical case for gratitude is, by the standards of positive psychology, reasonably robust. Research has shown that participants who kept weekly gratitude journals reported higher levels of wellbeing and life satisfaction compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral events. The effect sizes were moderate but consistent, and the finding has been replicated across a range of populations and contexts.

This work was built on with a now well-known “three good things” intervention, in which participants wrote down three things that went well each day along with their causes. The intervention produced lasting increases in happiness and decreases in depressive symptoms, with effects persisting for up to six months. What made this finding particularly noteworthy was the suggestion that a remarkably simple, low-cost activity could produce durable changes in subjective wellbeing.

At the neurological level, gratitude practice has been associated with increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in learning, decision-making, and social cognition. There is also evidence linking gratitude to enhanced dopaminergic and serotonergic activity, which may partly explain why grateful individuals tend to report better sleep, lower stress, and greater resilience.

In our view, we like to link these findings with the predictive coding / prediction engine models as well. We see gratitude practices as a way to change ourselves at the predictive coding level.

Gratitude at Work

Research in the workplace has demonstrated that expressions of gratitude significantly increased prosocial behaviour in recipients. For example, a simple thank-you from a beneficiary roughly doubled the likelihood that participants would help again in some studies. The mechanism appeared to be social worth: being thanked made people feel valued and socially significant, which in turn motivated further helping behaviour.

Algoe’s (2012) “find, remind, and bind” framework offers a useful lens here. According to this model, gratitude serves three relational functions:

• Find: it helps people identify (find) good relationship partners,
• Remind: it reminds them of the value of existing relationships, and
• Bind: it binds people together through reciprocal positive behaviour.

In team settings, this translates into stronger cohesion, greater willingness to go beyond formal role requirements, and more open communication.

We’ve seen this play out in organisations where leaders express genuine, specific appreciation for contributions. Not the performative, all-hands “I just want to thank everyone for their hard work” variety, but the kind where a manager takes a colleague aside and says something precise about what they did and why it mattered. The difference in impact is striking. In our experience, specificity is what separates gratitude that resonates from gratitude that people mentally file alongside corporate spam. And genuine appreciation. People tend to be very good at spotting fake appreciation, so the work here is really for leaders to develop their own gratitude muscles so they can provide genuine appreciation to others.

There is also a meaningful body of evidence linking gratitude to engagement. Employees who feel genuinely appreciated tend to report higher levels of organisational commitment, greater job satisfaction, and lower turnover intentions. This is not especially surprising, but it does confirm what most of us intuitively know: people want to feel that their contributions are noticed and valued by those around them.

As a side note here, as with the benefits of “purpose”, we see risks that where employees feel increased value in their roles as a result of non-monetary benefits that accrue (appreciation, purpose, achievement, etc), there is a risk that organisations pay them less until we reach a bit of a dire equilibrium. Employees should feel appreciated in their roles, and suitably remunerated.

The Limits and Criticisms

This is a bit of a theme of ours, akin to our criticisms of resilience training and “purpose” as mentioned above.

When organisations encourage gratitude without simultaneously addressing structural issues, pay, workload, autonomy, fairness, and so on, it can function as a form of emotional management that serves the institution rather than the individual. Telling employees to be grateful for what they have while ignoring legitimate grievances about working conditions is not a wellbeing intervention; it is, at best, a deflection and, at worst, a form of gaslighting.

Related to this is the risk of toxic positivity. Gratitude practices, when made mandatory or performatively enthusiastic, can suppress the very emotions that organisations most need to hear. If someone is burned out, underpaid, or working in a psychologically unsafe environment, asking them to list three things they’re grateful for is not just unhelpful; it communicates that their negative experience is unwelcome and should be managed away rather than addressed.

Cultural variation adds another layer of complexity. Gratitude norms vary considerably across cultures, both in terms of how gratitude is expressed and how comfortable people are with public displays of appreciation. Western, individualistic frameworks tend to treat gratitude as a personal virtue to be cultivated, but in more collectivist cultures, gratitude may be experienced and expressed quite differently. Importing Anglo-American gratitude practices into culturally diverse workplaces should be done with caution.

Finally, there is the inconvenient truth that forced gratitude practices almost always backfire. Mandatory gratitude journals, compulsory appreciation rounds in team meetings, and other institutionally required displays of thankfulness tend to produce compliance rather than genuine feeling. And compliance, in the domain of emotion, breeds resentment. There are numerous examples out there of where a well-intentioned gratitude initiative actually decreased morale because people experienced it as yet another demand on their emotional labour, and another sign that leaders simply are not really listening.

When Gratitude Is Genuinely Transformative

Gratitude is most powerful when it is voluntary, specific, and embedded in relationships characterised by trust. It works when a leader notices something genuine and says so. It works when team members develop the habit of acknowledging contributions without being told to. It works when organisations create the conditions, psychological safety, fairness, adequate resources, in which gratitude can arise naturally rather than being manufactured.

In practical terms, this means that organisations interested in cultivating gratitude should focus less on programmes and more on culture. Rather than rolling out a gratitude journal initiative, consider whether your managers know how to give specific, meaningful recognition. Rather than adding an appreciation round to every meeting, ask whether people feel safe enough to be honest about both what’s working and what isn’t. Gratitude that coexists with honest feedback and genuine concern for people’s wellbeing is robust and generative.

It is also worth noting that individual gratitude practice can be genuinely beneficial for those who choose to engage with it. The “three good things” exercise, when undertaken voluntarily and with reflection, remains one of the most cost-effective wellbeing interventions available. The key word, however, is voluntarily. The moment it becomes a corporate requirement, the psychological mechanism shifts from self-directed meaning-making to compliance, and the benefits mostly evaporate.

Practical Implications

For leaders and organisations seeking to harness gratitude authentically, a few principles are worth bearing in mind:

• Be specific. Generic thanks is background noise. Specific recognition of a particular contribution, its impact, and why it mattered is what actually lands.
• Make it voluntary. Invite gratitude practices; never mandate them. The moment appreciation becomes compulsory, it becomes performance.
• Address the structural stuff first. Gratitude is not a substitute for fair pay, reasonable workloads, and genuine psychological safety. Get the foundations right, and gratitude will follow naturally.
• Be honest about what gratitude cannot do. It will not fix a broken culture, compensate for poor leadership, or resolve systemic inequities. It is a complement to good organisational practice, not a replacement for it.
• Model it, don’t preach it. Leaders who express genuine gratitude regularly and naturally do more to shift culture than any programme ever could.
• Respect cultural differences. What feels authentic in one team may feel forced or uncomfortable in another. Pay attention to context.
• Start with Leaders. Role-modelling and being able to demonstrate genuine gratitude is contagious. If you help leaders and managers do this, others may follow.

Learning More

To go deeper, explore these resources on people-shift.com:

• The PERMA+ Model
• Subjective Wellbeing: What It Is and How to Boost It
• Hedonic Adaptation
• Celebrating Success
• Appreciative Enquiry

The People Shift View

We have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with gratitude, at least as it tends to be practised in organisations.

We get really wound up by gratitude initiatives that quietly paper over real problems. This stuff is just not fair, and it’s pretty lazy. Basically your saying to people, the fact that things here aren’t good isn’t an “us” problem, it’s a “you” problem because you’re just not being appreciative enough. That’s kinda sucky behaviour really. 

That said, we think genuine appreciation and gratitude are great things. They’re great for the individuals who experience, and great for those around them (if it’s not over the top). It’s normally pretty nice to be around positive people who grab life by the smooth handle. It makes it easier for us to do the same too. 

Our view is that gratitude is one of those rare things that is both simpler and more complex than it appears. Simpler because, at its core, it is about paying attention to what is good and saying so. More complex because the conditions that make it meaningful are easily corrupted by institutional pressure, performative culture, and the very human tendency to turn genuine feeling into obligatory ritual. We think the organisations that get gratitude right are the ones that worry less about gratitude programmes and more about whether people have something genuine to be grateful for.