Introduction
Gratitude at work doesn't soften ambition. It fuels it. In one well-known study, university fundraisers who were thanked by their director made about 50 percent more calls the following week than colleagues who weren't.
Many leaders carry a quiet assumption about gratitude. Spend too long appreciating what a team has done and people will settle in; keep the pressure on what's still missing and they'll keep reaching. That assumption shapes meetings more than most leaders realize. Agendas open with numbers and gaps, and thanks gets a line near the end if there's time.
The assumption treats gratitude and ambition as two ends of one dial, where turning one up turns the other down. Studies of what actually happens when people are thanked don't support that picture. The people who were thanked did more.
What Happened When Fundraisers Were Thanked
In a 2010 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Adam Grant and Francesca Gino worked with fundraisers at a public university. It's a job full of rejection, so appreciation is rare. A director visited the fundraisers and thanked them for their efforts. In the following week, those who had been thanked made about 50 percent more fundraising calls than colleagues who hadn't. The thank-you was brief, a passing comment rather than a ceremony, and it still changed behavior.
Grant and Gino traced the effect to a sense of social worth. Being thanked tells people that their work registered with someone and that it mattered. In a related experiment, people who received a note of thanks for helping edit a cover letter were about twice as likely to help again when asked.
Why Thanks Produces More Effort
Complacency grows when people believe their work doesn't matter or that the finish line has already been reached. Thanks does neither. It tells people their effort is visible, which makes the next round of effort feel worth giving. The fundraisers were thanked in the middle of a task they had every reason to find discouraging, and they went back to it with more energy.
That's why the dial picture fails. A person can be fully appreciated for what they did last quarter and fully committed to what comes next, because the appreciation is what makes the commitment feel reasonable. Juan Bendana makes the same point to audiences: you're allowed to want more and be grateful for what you have, and gratitude doesn't require you to stop growing.
What Grateful Leaders Get Back
Gratitude from a leader pays off for the leader too. In a 2019 study published in the Journal of Business Ethics, "Satisfied with the Job, But Not with the Boss", Lisa Ritzenhöfer, Prisca Brosi, Matthias Spörrle and Isabell Welpe ran two experiments and a field study on how followers react when leaders express gratitude. Leaders who expressed gratitude were seen as less selfish, which in turn led to higher follower satisfaction with the leader, more helpful behavior toward the leader, and lower intentions to leave the leader. A related study from the same research group found that leaders' gratitude also increased followers' trust in them.
Thanks tends to flow in one direction in most organizations, and power is part of the reason. A 2012 study by Ena Inesi, Deborah Gruenfeld and Adam Galinsky found that having power makes people more likely to doubt the motives behind generous gestures they receive from others. Leaders who can accept a sincere gesture from their team without suspicion keep open a channel that many senior people have quietly closed.
Where Gratitude Goes Wrong
Gratitude can backfire, and anyone who has received a hollow thank-you knows how. Social psychologist Heidi Grant points to one common failure: when people thank others, they drift into talking about themselves, as in "I was so relieved when you stepped in." Thanks lands better when it stays on the person receiving it and names what they did.
Appreciation also can't stand in for fixing a workload problem or an unfair process. Employees notice when a thank-you arrives in place of the change they were hoping for, and the gesture then reads as managing their feelings rather than respecting their work.
How to Build Gratitude at Work Into Team Routines
The practices with the best support are small:
Be specific. Thank people for a specific action and say what it made possible for someone. A named detail shows the work was actually seen.
Be prompt. Say it soon after the work happens, not at the year-end review.
Look down the org chart. Direct some thanks toward junior colleagues, since appreciation from a leader to a newer team member carries unusual weight.
Make it a habit, not a show. A short, optional round of appreciation at a recurring meeting, about a minute long, signals that gratitude is part of how the team operates, as long as people can opt in and it doesn't feel staged.
Then use the same meeting to say where the team is going next. The two fit in one sentence: thank you for the work, and here's the next thing we're going after.
This is also where Juan's Confidence Cycle applies. Confidence is built from evidence that your effort produces results, and being thanked is one of the clearest pieces of evidence a person can get that their effort registered.
Want More and Value What You've Built
Juan Bendana speaks to this tension in his keynotes on The Confidence Cycle and on making confidence a competitive advantage, where the message is that teams can want more and still value how far they've come. Sales kick-offs and annual meetings, where energy usually points entirely at the next target, are a natural setting for it, along with leadership conferences and corporate events where leaders want drive that doesn't wear people down.
Book Juan Bendana for your next sales kick-off, conference or corporate event if you want your people to leave hungry for what's next and clear about what they've already built.
Thank people for the work, then tell them where it goes next.