Employee recognition : understanding the construct, its measurement and its relationship to employee outcomes

Abstract

Despite its intuitive importance to organizational management, the concept of employee recognition has received little systematic research attention. Because there is no generally accepted construct definition, different studies tend to rely on a variety of conceptualizations and measures, the latter often being developed by the researchers for that specific study. This has resulted in a sparse and disorganized collection of knowledge regarding a construct that should be an essential component of any modern organizations' HR management strategy, leaving many to rely on anecdotal evidence or passing industry trends. The primary purpose of this research project was to establish an empirical basis on which future research could build. Using a conceptual definition put forth by Brun and Dugas (2008), a measure of employee recognition was developed and validated. Results from research involving this scale suggest it is a valid and reliable measure of employee recognition as a higher-order factor with four highly intercorrelated second-order facets. This measure can be used to predict outcomes such as organizational citizenship behaviors, organizational commitment, emotional well-being, turnover intention, perceived organizational support and self-rated job-performance. A vignette study demonstrated that while there may be a conceptual distinction between the facets of recognition. Because they are highly correlated, it is difficult to discriminate between the facets consistently. Therefore, it may be more effective to measure recognition as a higher-order factor, as evidenced by the fact that the different dimensions tended to have similar effects on outcomes. Finally, an eight week diary study suggested that recognition predicts between-person differences in organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), performance and emotional well-being, as well as longitudinal within-person changes in OCB and self-rated performance. Evidence generally indicated that recognition provides unique predictive ability over transformational leadership TFL. Taken together, the results of this research project support the use of recognition as an alternative or complementary predictor of important employee outcomes.