Praise may well be one of the most underestimated managerial tools. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many people wish they would receive more positive feedback, praise, encouragement and recognition from their significant others. And many adults deplore not having received enough pats on the back and positive encouragement from their parents in childhood and adolescence. The consequences of this lack of recognition for relationships and psychological well-being in adult life can be very negative.
A similar situation can be observed in business. Many employees across different industries complain that they do not receive enough recognition. And some surveys have identified that more than a third of employees who left their jobs cite the lack of recognition as the number one factor for their decision to quit. What better reason could there be to look at the phenomenon more closely?
The benefits of recognition in the workplace
Recognition in a professional context refers to acknowledgement and appreciation of work well done that is often expressed informally and should be genuine in character. It comes in many different disguises, for instance, personal recognition, recognition of employees’ work performance, their efforts at work or their way of doing their job. The most important source of recognition is frequently the direct supervisor of a focal employee.
Recognition from the supervisor is perceived by many employees as particularly relevant. In various survey studies, close to 80% of respondents indicate that they consider it highly important to receive recognition from their supervisor. And some research has suggested that the positive effect of recognition on task performance is equal to or potentially even higher than that of financial rewards.
Research unequivocally demonstrates that recognition at work is positively related to many important work outcomes. Those include employee engagement, task performance or engagement in discretionary work behaviors. Some surprising experimental studies show that simple words of appreciation for a work well done from direct supervisors significantly increased subsequent work effort. Conversely, lack of recognition has been shown to be related to lower employee morale, lower employee engagement, lower well-being and increased turnover.
The beneficial effects of recognition unfold via the detour of so-called “affective events”. When employees receive recognition, they are more likely to experience positive affective states like satisfaction, pride or joy. Conversely, lack of recognition is connected with negative affect states including fear, anger or sadness.
Who benefits most from recognition – The role of personal values
The positive effects of recognition on employees’ job attitudes are indirectly related to, among other things, service quality and organizational profitability. This prompts an obvious question: Given its business relevance and given all the evidence for its beneficial effects, why do managers not give more recognition to their direct reports?
Many managers report being overwhelmed and needing more time to engage in recognition. This suggests that being more selective in targeting subordinates as recipients for recognition may be a step forward.
In our empirical study we looked at the importance of personal values for the effectiveness of recognition in the workplace. Personal values can be defined as goals that are perceived as desirable for individuals across different contexts and situations and therefore serve as guiding principles in their lives. Researchers have developed various model for describing and measuring these personal values. We used a framework developed by Schwartz which includes ten universal values.
The intuition behind our research was that depending on the personal values they espouse certain individuals may be more or less in need of and/or receptive to recognition from their supervisor. Our attention was particularly drawn to values described as “conservation values”, including conformity, tradition and security.
We suggest that employees who score high on conservation values put a particular emphasis on loyalty to their employer and on respect for the hierarchy. As such, there engagement with and commitment to the organization may be naturally higher than – and less impacted by recognition – than for those who score lower on conservation values. For the latter, engagement with and loyalty to the organization is not necessarily a given. As a result, they rely more on external motivating factors to maintain engagement and other positive job attitudes – and recognition is an important factor in this context.
The results of our study, based on a sample of more than 300 employees in various industries in Europe, confirmed this idea. They show that, indeed, recognition from the supervisor was more strongly positively related to job satisfaction and employee engagement for employees who scored low on conservation values. For turnover intention, the opposite picture emerged. Here, recognition from the supervisor lowered turnover intentions more strongly for employees low on conservation values.
Interestingly, the study also confirmed previous findings that recognition from supervisor is positively related to job satisfaction and employee engagement – and negatively related to turnover intentions – for all employees, regardless of where they stand on the topic of personal values.
So what can we learn from these findings? The first insight is that when it comes to providing recognition to subordinates, more is better. This applies to all employees, regardless of their personal values. Managers who want to reap benefits in terms of positive work attitudes and reduced turnover intentions from their employees should more often use opportunities for informal and genuine positive feedback about their efforts and achievements. In addition, these benefits will also have a tendency to trickle down to measures of organizational performance such as satisfaction with service and organizational profitability.
Secondly, if managers are short on time and need to be selective in handing out praise they may find it useful to focus their efforts on those of their subordinates who are less traditional in their value orientation (those more likely to seek autonomy and challenge authority). A related danger, obviously, is that selective treatment of subordinates may lead to perceptions of procedural unfairness, which bear negative consequences. Therefore, our recommendation would be that recognition should be provided in private, one-on-one settings rather than in public, in order to avoid demotivating effects for those who were not targeted.
Full Professor of Organizational Behavior at EHL
