Recognition: A Powerful, but often Overlooked, Leadership Tool to Improve Employee Performance

A key dimension for effective leadership involves reinforcing and motivating others to encourage superior performance. Financial and non-financial rewards can be utilized for this purpose. This paper explores the background on the nature and importance of employee recognition as an effective leadership tool and reports the results of a survey examining the value of recognition to all levels of employees in a large, nonprofit institution. These employees indicated they value highly personalized recognition for a job well done as a critical dimension of their reward system. These findings provide further evidence that employee recognition should be given more attention by leaders as they attempt to meet the retention and productivity challenges facing today's organizations.