Generating Gratitude in the Workplace to Improve Job Satisfaction

A nursing shortage is looming yet again and has been well documented in the literature. As a result, it is vital that we keep the nursing faculty we have and improve the job satisfaction of those faculty as much as possible. Studies show the cost of replacing an employee ranges from six months’ salary to as much as twice their annual salary (Merhar, 2016). Higher education continues to struggle with having adequate funding and cannot afford the cost of turnover. In addition, the nursing shortage decreases the supply of qualified faculty making it imperative that faculty turnover be kept to a minimum. One way to directly improve retention rates is by improving job satisfaction (Derby-Davis, 2014). Research has shown that salary and compensation is only a small part of job satisfaction (Wang & Liesveld, 2015). Gutierrez, Candela, & Carver (2012) demonstrated that perceived organizational support had an impact on the job satisfaction of nursing faculty especially when associated with other factors. It is important to find and explore innovative ways that enhance organizational support to increase job satisfaction and facilitate retention.

One innovative intervention that we utilized to improve job satisfaction and increase collaboration was cultivating an ‘attitude of gratitude’. Gratitude is recognized as a positive emotion and is associated with empathy, increased self-esteem, and overall happiness (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002). Grateful people have increased coping skills, more positive emotions, and deal with problems in a more direct way (Lin, 2015). Increased gratitude is also positively correlated with improved interactions and greater social support from coworkers(Lin, 2015; McCullough et al., 2002), which we hypothesized would improve job satisfaction.

To assess if our intervention was successful a pre and post survey of faculty on perceived gratitude levels and job satisfaction was administered prior to the start and at the end of the project. We introduced the theme of ‘Attitude of Gratitude’ in the opening faculty meeting and continued gratitude discussion at each faculty meeting throughout the year. We provided a book on gratitude and offered optional lunch session gratitude collaboration groups twice each semester. We also established a social media group site related to this topic for people to share and interacted with faculty related to the topic through email, breakroom bulletin board, and mailboxes. Our ultimate goal in introducing gratitude interventions was to create a more collaborative and grateful environment that would ultimately lead to increased job satisfaction for faculty.