Employee Gratitude: A Win-Win for the Employer and the Employee

Stress causes serious illnesses and damages employee well-being. The mutual gains Human Resource Management (HRM) framework places HRM practices as the custodian of employee well-being in an organization. This study presents a mutual gains HRM framework which has three components. First, employees can perceive that their organization enacts HRM practices from two benevolent intentions a) to help employees perform better and b) to improve their well-being. Second, these benevolent HRM attributions invoke gratitude among employees. Third, gratitude reduces employees’ perceived stress and improves their engagement levels. Fourth, gratitude mediates the relationship between both benevolent HRM attributions, employee stress and engagement levels. Purposive sampling technique was deployed for the collection of data using structured questionnaire from two hundred and ninety-two respondents, working in the telecommunications sector of Pakistan. Measurement and structural model validity were tested through structural equation modelling (SEM) using Mplus 7.0. The findings confirmed theoretical connotations among the constructs. The study contributes to the literature by introducing a new HRM framework mediated by gratitude to reduce employee stress levels and improve their engagement.