Meghan Kane and colleagues explore how gratitude expressed by leaders spread through an organizational hierarchy to impact employees who never directly witnessed it. Analyzing multi-wave field data and a controlled experiment with supervisor-subordinate pairs, they find that when managers express gratitude, their supervisors become more likely to express gratitude too, which in turn makes those supervisors’ own subordinates more likely to express gratitude, an effect driven not by employees simply imitating their leader or catching their mood, but by a distinct mechanism the authors call “grateful attention,” where witnessing a leader’s gratitude redirects employees’ focus toward things in their own environment worth appreciating.
Grateful Leaders and Attentive Followers: How Gratitude Trickles Down Through Organizations
