Campus Location

Dallas Campus (Online)

Date of Award

3-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Department

Organizational Leadership

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Kristin Koetting O'Byrne

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Heather Rasmussen

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Scott Strawn

Abstract

Software developers can suffer from negative emotions at work and low job satisfaction. Less is known about how positive emotions at work impact software developers. Gratitude is one positive emotion that has predicted job satisfaction in other studies. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to explore how gratitude at work predicts job satisfaction among software developers. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and the find-remind-and-bind theory of gratitude guided the study. Participants included 146 software developers who were recruited via LinkedIn using purposive sampling. Participants completed an online survey, including the Gratitude Questionnaire-Six Item Form and the Appreciation in Relationships scale. The results of a multiple regression analysis revealed that a model of five independent variables of gratitude at work statistically significantly predicted job satisfaction. Dispositional gratitude at work was the only individual statistically significant predictor of job satisfaction. The results align with previous studies that show gratitude at work can boost the job satisfaction of software developers. Recommendations for future research and for practitioners are included.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Included in

Education Commons

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.