Purpose: The purpose of this paper is study the possible impact of gratitude on employee morale and explore how the use of gratitude as a verbal reward can enhance the morale of an employee within an organization. It also aims to understand the current perception of gratitude in the workplace in organizations in India.
Design/methodology/approach: The research is a combination of a literature review of 20 papers and quantitative survey responses from 120 full time professionals with minimum three years of work experience across the spectrum of industries. Since employee morale as a component is difficult to measure quantitatively, indicators representing the same were identified. Contentment, Happiness and Motivation were the key indicators used in the research to try and establish a correlation between gratitude and employee morale.
Findings: Gratitude has a positive impact on motivation, happiness and contentment and respondents feel that there is still scope for further improvement in the culture of gratitude. Personally expressed gratitude has a greater impact than gratitude expressed generally towards the team.
Research limitations and implications: Although it is presumed that all respondents are from India, the respondents were not asked to divulge information regarding their location in the survey. Conducting this survey in another country with another value for gratitude could produce different results. Therefore, the applicability of findings for this research is best suited to organizations that either have operations in India or largely deal with an Indian workforce. Other variables to study the impact on employee morale that have been eliminated from this research are productivity, performance, employee engagement and culture. Hence, the research is only suited for drawing clear inferences of the relation between gratitude and employee morale.
Originality/value: Practical application after synthesizing themes explored in this research can help executives/managers improve employee morale in the organization with better use of gratitude in their verbal communication and maintain a satisfied workforce.