Everyone likes a bit of praise, whether in our professional or personal lives, and various studies have examined the impact praise has on performance and wellbeing.

For instance, one from last year found that praising employees individually can boost the performance of other members of the team, and therefore of the team as a whole.

“Our findings are based on laboratory and field experiments in China, and those findings tell us that recognizing individual team members can supercharge team performance,” the authors say.

A wide glow

This finding was reinforced in a more recent study from the University of Konstanz, which found that praise for performance had a bigger impact on those who heard the praise, but were not the direct recipients of it.

An experiment was conducted whereby 300 participants were divided into 15 groups.  The top 30% of 8 randomly chosen groups were chosen for unexpected praise.  Their subsequent performance was then compared with similarly talented participants in the control groups who had received no praise.

Interestingly, there was no significant change in their performance, however those who were not in the top 30% of the ‘praise’ group saw their own performance improve significantly.

“Human behaviour is influenced by the individual’s personal understanding of the norm. This applies for academia as well as business environments. Student performance is influenced not only by personal benefits, such as grades or passing an exam, but also by the existing performance norms,” the researchers say.

Establishing the norm

So what’s happening?  Well it appears as though the praise is effectively establishing what is the normal level of performance for the group.  In other words, when praise is given to an individual, then they are representing the performance norm for the group.  This may then motivate those who have not achieved this level yet.

It’s quite a potent reminder that a simple thank you can have wide reaching implications, and provide a performance boost to a much wider pool of people than simply the recipient.