Thanking someone, and what experiments measure of it

Several experiments have tested the effect of symbolic recognition, a thank-you letter, a public distinction, a mention in internal communication, on tasks where output is measurable.

Work by Michael Kosfeld and Susanne Neckermann, published in 2011, then by other teams, finds positive effects on measured output during the period immediately following the award. In their protocol, the distinction had no monetary value, which allows the observed effect to be attributed to its symbolic dimension alone rather than to a material gain.

The question is not only economic. Sociologists of work and philosophers, such as Axel Honneth in 1992, make recognition a central dimension of people's relationship to work, which experiments capture only from a narrow angle, that of measured output.

Measured effects fade quickly, over durations counted in days or weeks depending on the protocol. Few experiments follow beyond that, which leaves open the question of more diffuse effects, on attachment or on staff turnover.

That brevity is not specific to symbolic recognition: experiments on one-off bonuses find comparable profiles, which suggests a common mechanism of return to a reference level.

Several experiments measure the output of people not distinguished and find effects varying with the design: neutral where the distinction is open to all, negative where it is limited by a quota.

That result echoes work on relative incentives and on forced ranking, which finds the same mechanism in different contexts. A distinction awarded to a few is also, for the others, information about their own standing, and it may be read as an implicit judgement on their work.

Systematic schemes, where recognition is distributed at regular intervals to a large number of people, lose their effect in several studies.

The proposed explanation is informational: a distinction conveys information only if it is rare, and generalising it empties it of content without removing its administrative cost. The same reasoning applies to thanks perceived as automatic, which their recipients quickly learn to stop reading.

It concerns measurable tasks, in contexts where individual output can be isolated. Its transposition to collective and hard-to-measure activities has not been established, even though it is in those activities that recognition is most often invoked.

Nor does it say anything about the articulation with pay, a distinct question that work on fairness addresses with results less favourable to substitution. The effort-reward imbalance model proposed by Johannes Siegrist in fact classes esteem among rewards, alongside pay and job security, not in their place.