Grateful Leaders and Attentive Followers: How Grateful Attention Transmits the Cascade of Gratitude Expressions to Strengthen Coworker Relationships.

Leader gratitude expressions are widely viewed as a powerful tool to build relationships with and foster the well-being of followers. The present research moves beyond the impact of that gratitude to address whether and how leader gratitude spreads beyond immediate subordinates to influence others throughout the organizational hierarchy. Existing perspectives suggest that leader behaviors may spread via behavioral imitation or emotional contagion, yet gratitude-an appraisal-dependent emotion-likely requires distinct cognitive processes to propagate. Integrating gratitude research with social information processing theory (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978), we propose a novel pathway of gratitude trickle-down effects, grateful attention, defined as the allocation of attention toward gratitude-inducing stimuli in the workplace, including interpersonal and environmental cues. We argue that witnessing leader gratitude expressions shapes followers' attentional deployment, increasing followers' recognition of benefaction events and promoting their own gratitude expressions, which subsequently improves the quality of their relationships with coworkers. Across two preregistered field studies and a preregistered yoked experimental causal chain study, we competitively test grateful attention alongside social learning (leader emulation) and emotional contagion (felt gratitude). Results consistently demonstrate that grateful attention uniquely transmits the cascading effects of leader gratitude expressions beyond traditional behavioral and emotional explanations. These findings advance theory by identifying an information processing function of gratitude and clarify how leader gratitude expressions can catalyze the spread of gratitude throughout organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).