A new study published in BMC Psychology looked at enhanced work engagement in Japanese employees following a 12-day online gratitude journal intervention.
“Our study explored whether focusing on gratitude through a short journaling practice could really change how people feel about their work,” study author Noriko Yamagishi of Ritsumeikan University told us. « We asked employees to spend a few minutes each day, over a two-week period, writing about things they felt grateful for.”
The research team wanted to see whether this simple practice could enhance their positive feelings toward their work and sense of engagement. In other words, can gratitude, something we often think of as a personal or emotional experience, translate into greater engagement and better functioning in professional life.
“My thinking was based on two frameworks: the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions,” Yamagishi told us. “The JD-R model suggests that employees become more engaged when they recognize and make use of the personal and job resources available to them, especially job resources such as supportive colleagues, autonomy, or encouragement from supervisors.”
The Broaden-and-Build Theory, on the other hand, proposes that positive emotions like gratitude broaden attention and thinking, helping people notice more possibilities and build lasting psychological resources. By combining these perspectives, the researchers expected that focusing on gratitude would shift people’s attention toward the positive aspects and supports in their work environment and that the cognitive shift, in turn, could enhance motivation and lead to greater work engagement.
“I’ve been studying attention and motivation for many years, and I’ve always been fascinated by how small shifts in our perception can change how we experience the world,” Yamagishi told us. “Gratitude is one of those shifts.”
In an earlier study published in BMC Psychology in 2021, Yamagishi showed that keeping a gratitude journal enhanced academic motivation among university students. That finding made Yamagishi wonder whether a similar approach could work in the workplace, where engagement plays a critical role in performance and in protecting people from burnout.
“Many employees struggle with disengagement, and large-scale interventions can be expensive and difficult to sustain,” Yamagishi told us. “I wanted to test whether something as simple as gratitude journaling, a practice that takes only a few minutes a day, could make a meaningful difference for working adults.”
Yamagishi also hoped to show, through rigorous evidence, that gratitude is not just a feel-good emotion but a cognitive and motivational process that can be applied effectively in professional settings.
“The results were very encouraging,” Yamagishi told us. “Employees who kept the gratitude journal showed higher scores on the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) after just twelve days, particularly in the total engagement score and the absorption subscale, how deeply immersed they felt in their work.”
In research on engagement, the UWES total score is generally considered a good indicator of overall engagement, so this improvement is meaningful.
“We also conducted a text analysis using correspondence analysis, which revealed that certain job resource-related words, such as ‘colleagues,’ ‘support,’ and ‘supervisor’ appeared only in the gratitude journals, not in the control group’s entries,” Yamagishi told us. “This suggests that writing about gratitude led people to become more aware of the supportive elements and resources that already existed in their workplace.”
Interestingly, noted Yamagishi, both the gratitude and control groups showed small gains in general well-being, suggesting that journaling itself may offer some benefit. But only the gratitude group showed a clear rise in engagement, indicating that the focus on gratitude, not just writing, was the key factor driving positive change by increased awareness of job resources.
“I think these results show that gratitude can be a practical, science-based way to
strengthen employee engagement,” Yamagishi told us. “It doesn’t require a major organizational program, just two weeks of brief daily journaling can produce measurable improvements, and those effects can last for about a month. That’s quite encouraging, given how simple and low-cost the practice is.”