How Does Confucian Culture Shape Employee Gratitude in the Workplace? Exploratory Research Based on Grounded Theory

Abstract

Gratitude significantly affects employees’ positive psychology and behavior, and how to cultivate workplace gratitude has become an important practical issue. This article selected a Chinese company for field research and employed a grounded theory approach to investigate how Confucian culture shapes gratitude in the workplace. The findings indicated that Confucian culture influenced employees’ inward and benevolent attributional tendencies in the continuous interaction among the organization, employees, and their families. This prompted employees to engage in positive benefit appraisals and ultimately be grateful. The findings contribute to a Confucian cultural shaping process model of gratitude in the workplace and demonstrate distinct advantages over currently prevalent gratitude interventions or cultivation methods. This not only enriches the theory of workplace gratitude cultivation and cultural construction of emotions but also provides a clear pathway for organizational implementation. More specifically, we highlight that workplace emotion research needs to focus on the shaping processes of different social cultures, which can serve as a valuable corporate resource.