Recognition at Work: How Managerial Acknowledgment Shapes Team-Level Outcomes

Employee recognition has become a central focus for organizations worldwide, with billions of dollars spent annually on recognition programs. Despite this investment, scientific research on the effectiveness of recognition beyond performance outcomes remains limited. Furthermore, little is known about how recognition operates at the team-level and the specific attributes that make recognition impactful. This study addresses these gaps by disentangling the nuanced attributes of recognition and exploring their influence on employee perceptions of recognition. It also examines how these perceptions affect key outcomes, including perceptions of manager support, job security, autonomy, team cohesion, and engagement, and tests whether trust moderates the relationship between objective recognition and perceived recognition. Using data from an organization’s recognition platform, the findings indicate that recognition quality was related to perceived recognition, however this relationship differed across samples. Trust did not moderate this relationship in either dataset. Perceived recognition was consistently associated with job security, manager support, autonomy, and cohesion, and each of these work conditions, as well as perceived recognition itself, predicted engagement. By integrating objective recognition data with employee perceptions, this study provides a novel methodological approach to understanding the collective impact of managerial recognition on teams and offers evidence-based insights for improving recognition practices and team-level outcomes.