| Author: | Ho, King Man |
| Title: | Winning the war for talent : benefits of gratitude intervention and its limitations |
| Advisors: | Liu, Wu (MM) Lin, Katrina (MM) |
| Degree: | D.B.A. |
| Year: | 2023 |
| Subject: | Employee retention Personnel management Psychology Industrial Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Faculty of Business |
| Pages: | x, 209 pages : illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Amid relentless competition for talent at the organizational and even national level, talent retention has emerged as an indispensable factor in winning the “war for talent”. Previous studies have shown that the total cost for replacing an experienced employee could be up to 1.5 times of the employee’s annual compensation. For large corporations, even a slight improvement in staff attrition rate could potentially save millions of dollars each year. Inspired by the unfolding model of voluntary turnover and the well-established literature on gratitude practice, this research seeks to discover an innovative and effective tactic to augment staff retention efforts of organizations. In this study, four types of negative shocks perceived by employees in the workplace were defined and examined. The results of the analyses reveal that three out of the four types broadly fit into a research model that elucidates the mechanism for how negative shocks lead to increased turnover intention, with the basic constructs of ego depletion and negative affect serving as mediators. A field experiment was conducted to investigate the moderating effect of gratitude intervention on the relationship between negative shocks and these two constructs. The results were counterintuitive – gratitude intervention unexpectedly amplified ego depletion and negative affect for those who experienced certain types of negative shocks, possibly due to cognitive dissonance. This occurred even though gratitude intervention was found to be negatively associated to turnover intention for those who had not recently experienced any negative shock. While gratitude intervention has proven beneficial to the psychological well-being on various fronts, this research unveiled its limitations and potential drawbacks. It also validated the claim in earlier literature that daily gratitude intervention, even lasting for just one week, could engender meaningful changes in one’s state gratitude. Given the counterintuitive result, supplementary testing was performed with an aim to discover further insights. It revealed that an actual increase in state gratitude (“gratitude improvement”) moderated the relationships between one type of negative shock and the two mediators in a positive way. In other words, gratitude improvement reduced the impact of the negative shock on both ego depletion and negative affect. This result aligns with the prediction in the literature review, and encourages future studies to investigate whether a more generic procedure for gratitude intervention (as opposed to the work-related intervention procedure adopted in this study) could improve state gratitude without inducing excessive cognitive dissonance, thereby achieving the desired result of positively moderating the mediators and substantiating the practical value of gratitude intervention. From practitioners’ perspective, this research supports promoting the practice of gratitude in organizations as an auxiliary tactic for ongoing management of staff turnover. However, it should not be implemented during periods of turbulence – such as during an organizational restructure or a transformational program, which may induce various types of shocks across the organization and render work-related gratitude interventions counterproductive. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6999.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 1.99 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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