Why Mattering Is a More Direct Driver of Employee Engagement, Performance, and Retention
Belonging has become one of the most heavily invested-in priorities in modern people strategy. Organizations design distinctive headquarters, build culture programs, and roll out initiatives meant to deepen employees’ connection to the company (Shore et al., 2011). These efforts have genuinely improved how people experience work — but they leave a stubborn question unanswered: is belonging actually what keeps employees engaged, high-performing, and committed over time? A growing body of research suggests it isn’t — at least, not on its own.
Employees can feel included on a team while still sensing that their contributions are undervalued, invisible, or unimportant (Flett et al., 2019; Lombard & Cheryan, 2024). Belonging captures the experience of feeling part of a like-minded group, but it does not capture whether employees believe their unique work matters to the organization. That distinction is where mattering enters the picture. By tying individual effort to recognized impact, mattering offers a more direct explanation for engagement and performance (Reece et al., 2019).
As Reece et al. (2019) observed, it is hard to imagine employees staying motivated and satisfied if they believe their work does not matter to their organization. Feeling included without feeling like one matters is costly — it shows up as lower job satisfaction, higher stress, and disengagement, all of which raise the likelihood that an employee eventually leaves (Bucher et al., 2019; Richards et al., 2017).
The literature consistently identifies two reinforcing sides to mattering: feeling valued and adding value (Ellington, 2023; Prilleltensky, 2020; Reece et al., 2019; Scarpa et al., 2022). Feeling valued is the experience of being recognized, respected, and affirmed for one’s contributions. Adding value is the experience of contributing in a way that is seen and acknowledged. The relationship between the two is cyclical — when employees feel valued, they are more likely to contribute, and contribution creates new opportunities to be seen (Prilleltensky, 2020; Reece et al., 2019; Scarpa et al., 2022).
This paper argues that mattering is a more direct and accurate driver of employee engagement, performance, and retention than belonging, because it ties individual effort to perceived impact and meaningful contribution rather than culture fit alone. The argument unfolds in four parts: defining mattering at work, distinguishing it from belonging, reviewing the empirical case for mattering as a stronger driver of engagement and performance, and examining what happens to employees when mattering is absent.
Literature Review
Defining Organizational Mattering
Mattering has been defined in slightly different ways across the literature, but the core idea is consistent: it is the balance of feeling valued, adding value, and being recognized for one’s contributions (Flett et al., 2019; Prilleltensky, 2020; Reece et al., 2019; Scarpa et al., 2022). Mattering is not just inclusion — it is whether one’s efforts are seen and experienced as meaningful in a given context. For the purposes of this paper, organizational mattering is defined as the perception that one’s work adds value, is recognized, and produces visible and meaningful impact.
It is also important to distinguish mattering at work from mattering in one’s personal life. People can feel valued as a human being or believe their presence is meaningful to family and friends while still feeling that their contributions at work go unnoticed. Workplace mattering is specifically tied to whether one’s efforts are recognized as impactful within the organization — not to general personal significance, but to being valued for one’s unique contributions (Reece et al., 2019; Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981, as cited in Lombard & Cheryan, 2024).
Flett et al. (2019) connect mattering to broader psychological well-being, arguing that feeling significant is foundational to how people function. In their framing, mattering is not only about being valued in a general sense; it involves being recognized as a distinct individual. People do not just want to be included — they want to be seen for who they are and what they uniquely contribute. This becomes especially relevant at work, where identity and contribution are tightly linked.
Reece et al. (2019) offer a more action-oriented view. Unlike interpersonal mattering, which is primarily about emotional connection, mattering at work is anchored in the impact of one’s contributions. Across four studies developing the Organizational Mattering Scale, they found that mattering correlated more strongly with self-efficacy than with self-esteem, reinforcing that workplace mattering is grounded in what employees actually do and produce, not simply in how they feel about themselves. Employees assess whether their work produces meaningful outcomes and whether those contributions are recognized — shifting mattering from passively feeling supported to actively evaluating whether one’s effort makes a difference. This dimension ties organizational mattering closely to engagement, job satisfaction, and productivity (Lombard & Cheryan, 2024; Reece et al., 2019).
Mattering vs. Belonging
Belonging and mattering are closely related, but they are distinct constructs and should not be treated as interchangeable. The distinction matters when explaining what actually drives engagement, performance, and retention.
Belonging is a sense of relatedness. It answers the question of whether employees see themselves reflected in the organization’s people, culture, core values, and mission. People choose social identities and seek acceptance in groups that align with how they see themselves (Shore et al., 2011). At work, belonging is the experience of being part of something — a team, a community, an organization (Filstad et al., 2019). Employees often look to the organization itself as the foundation for belonging, expecting leadership to set the tone, values, and atmosphere that make identification possible (Filstad et al., 2019), but it is also built through small everyday signals — shared lunches, hallway conversations, and rituals that mark membership (Filstad et al., 2019).
Belonging, in other words, is rooted in the human need for connection and acceptance within a group. It reflects how socially integrated people feel, balancing inclusion with individuality (Shore et al., 2011). But feeling connected does not automatically mean that one’s contributions are recognized or impactful — and this is where belonging starts to fall short as an explanation for engagement and performance. Shore et al.’s (2011) Optimal Distinctiveness framework, building on Brewer (1991, as cited in Shore et al., 2011), argues that real inclusion at work requires two needs to be met at once: belongingness and value in uniqueness. Employees with high belongingness but low value in uniqueness are not genuinely included; they are “assimilated,” pressured to conform and downplay what makes them distinct (Shore et al., 2011). True inclusion happens only when employees feel both like insiders and valued for what they uniquely contribute. This framework points to why belonging alone is not enough — it accounts for only half of what employees need. The other half — being recognized and valued for distinct contributions — is precisely what mattering addresses.
Lombard and Cheryan (2024) used factor analysis to test whether mattering is empirically distinct from belonging and other related constructs. The analysis confirmed that it is. Their research also showed that reduced mattering — not reduced belonging — accounts for gender disparities in workplace persistence and engagement, particularly in male-dominated fields. Women in those environments could feel socially included while simultaneously sensing that their contributions were undervalued, a pattern that belonging alone cannot explain (Lombard & Cheryan, 2024).
Mattering does not replace belonging; it completes what belonging starts. Feeling included is meaningful, but mattering requires the additional perception that one’s contributions are seen, recognized, and consequential. When employees belong without mattering, they may stay in the organization while quietly disengaging from the work itself (Bucher et al., 2019; Lombard & Cheryan, 2024; R & Sujatha, 2023). When employees matter, they experience both connection and impact — and that combination is what sustains engagement, performance, and retention over time.
Mattering as a Driver of Performance-Related Outcomes
If belonging accounts for connection and mattering accounts for contribution, the relevant question for organizations is whether mattering actually produces the outcomes they care about: engagement, performance, satisfaction, and retention. The evidence increasingly suggests it does — and often more directly than belonging alone.
Reece et al. (2019) provide the most comprehensive case. Across four studies developing the Organizational Mattering Scale, they found that mattering was positively associated with job satisfaction, leadership roles, recent promotions, and retention. Importantly, mattering correlated more strongly with self-efficacy than with self-esteem, reinforcing that workplace mattering is action-oriented — tied to what employees do and whether those contributions are recognized, rather than to how they feel about themselves in general. Mattering, in this view, captures the mechanism by which employees connect their effort to outcomes — exactly the link that drives sustained engagement.
The strongest evidence for mattering’s specific role comes from Bucher et al.’s (2019) longitudinal study of digital workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk — workers who, in their own descriptions, often see themselves as “cogs in a machine” or “anonymous numbers” (Salehi et al., 2015, as cited in Bucher et al., 2019). The researchers identified four dimensions of mattering in this context — reliance, social recognition, importance, and interaction — and tested which predicted work engagement over time. Strikingly, social recognition, the dimension most closely tied to belonging and interpersonal connection, did not. What predicted engagement was the ability to construct a narrative of one’s own significance, even under the isolating conditions of platform labor. This is direct support for the claim that engagement is driven less by social connection itself than by the perception that one’s work contributes meaningfully to something larger.
Richards et al. (2017) found similar patterns in a more conventional workplace. In a study of 500 physical education teachers, perceived mattering had both direct and indirect effects on job satisfaction, working through role stress and emotional exhaustion. Teachers who felt that they and their work mattered reported lower role conflict, lower role overload, and lower burnout, each of which independently predicted higher job satisfaction. When employees perceive that their contributions are recognized and valued, they experience less strain and more satisfaction — which in turn supports retention and sustained performance. The pathway held across teachers with and without coaching responsibilities, suggesting the effect is robust across roles.
Together, these studies show that mattering is associated with the outcomes organizations most want to cultivate: engagement, job satisfaction, reduced burnout, and retention. It is the adding-value dimension specifically — the perception that one’s contributions produce meaningful impact — that most consistently predicts these outcomes. Belonging-adjacent constructs like social recognition contribute to the experience of mattering, but on their own they do not sustain the engagement and performance organizations depend on. This is the core of the case for mattering as a more direct driver: it captures the specific psychological need to link individual effort to perceived impact.
The Cost of Anti-Mattering
If mattering drives engagement and performance, its absence produces its own set of consequences — real damage to well-being, engagement, and sustained effort (Flett et al., 2019; Karam et al., 2025; R & Sujatha, 2023; Richards et al., 2017). This is the blind spot in belonging-focused cultures: employees can feel socially included yet professionally disengaged, staying in the organization while quietly disengaging from the work itself (Lombard & Cheryan, 2024).
Research on anti-mattering — the perception that one is insignificant, invisible, or unseen — provides a clear window into this dynamic (Karam et al., 2025). Flett et al. (2019) argue that feelings of not mattering are directly linked to depression and reduced well-being, suggesting that mattering functions as a fundamental psychological need. Giumetti and Kowalski (2024) similarly report higher depressive symptoms and reduced life satisfaction among those who feel they do not matter. The pattern is consistent: when mattering is absent, well-being suffers.
In the workplace, that absence translates directly into performance costs. Richards et al.’s (2017) structural model showed that low perceived mattering was associated with higher role stress and emotional exhaustion among teachers — and emotional exhaustion is a core dimension of burnout and a leading indicator of eventual turnover. The chain they document is clear: low mattering leads to role stress, role stress leads to emotional exhaustion, and exhaustion leads to reduced job satisfaction and slow disengagement.
R and Sujatha (2023) extended these findings to a sample of 302 IT employees, where perceptions of anti-mattering were negatively associated with sustainable performance — even when employees reported high levels of job embeddedness and contentment. This finding is striking because job embeddedness captures many of the relational and situational factors typically associated with belonging: connections to colleagues, organizational fit, and the practical costs of leaving. Anti-mattering still predicted reduced performance despite all of that, suggesting that belonging-adjacent programs cannot compensate for feeling insignificant. Employees can be embedded, connected, and even content, and still underperform if they perceive that their contributions do not matter.
Put differently: organizations can invest heavily in culture, connection, and inclusion initiatives and still produce employees who are disengaged, exhausted, and quietly exiting. The missing component is mattering — specifically, the perception that one’s contributions are seen, valued, and consequential. Employees who do not feel that they matter may stay, but the cost eventually surfaces as burnout, turnover intentions, and diminished performance (Karam et al., 2025; R & Sujatha, 2023; Richards et al., 2017).
Cultivating Mattering in Organizations
If mattering and belonging are distinct, organizations need to treat them as distinct initiatives. Belonging-oriented programs focus on culture, community, and shared identity (Filstad et al., 2019; Shore et al., 2011). Mattering needs a more individualized lens — practices that connect specific people to specific contributions and reward the impact those contributions produce (Prilleltensky, 2020; Reece et al., 2019). Prilleltensky (2020) describes mattering as both relational and structural: it depends on how people are treated, what they are able to contribute, and whether the systems around them make those contributions visible. Scarpa et al.’s (2022) Mattering in Domains of Life Scale similarly captures mattering as multidimensional, with feeling valued and adding value operating across interpersonal, group, and institutional contexts. Translated into practice, that points to several concrete levers, each tied to one of the two reinforcing sides of mattering.
Treat mattering as a leadership competency
Before any specific practice, mattering needs to be located somewhere in the organization — and the literature consistently locates it with leaders. Ellington (2023) argues that mattering belongs in leadership development, not in the soft-cultural margins, and that leaders can be trained in it and held accountable for it. Filstad et al. (2019) support this from a different angle: employees look to leadership to set the tone and atmosphere that make identification with the organization possible. Applied to mattering, that makes leaders the primary signal-senders for whether contributions are seen. Reece et al. (2019) point to the same lever, since direct managers are closest to employees’ day-to-day work and best positioned to recognize specific contributions. The gap is that most leadership programs teach communication, feedback, and coaching in general terms. Few teach the specific practices the literature points to: naming contributions precisely, closing impact loops, distributing attention equitably, and recognizing employees as distinct individuals (Flett et al., 2019). Building those practices into competency models, manager performance reviews, 360-degree feedback, and formal training is what closes the gap between what the research shows and what leaders are actually equipped to do.
Make recognition contribution-specific
General affirmation supports belonging. It does very little for mattering. What employees actually need is to hear that a particular contribution they made produced a particular outcome. Across four validation studies, Reece et al. (2019) found that mattering correlated more strongly with self-efficacy than with self-esteem, reinforcing that the experience is grounded in what someone does rather than how they feel about themselves in general. Flett et al. (2019) push this further: people do not just want to feel included, they want to be seen for what they uniquely contribute. Scarpa et al. (2022) make the same point in their multidimensional model — feeling valued is anchored in the perception that one’s specific contributions, not one’s general presence, are noticed. Recognition that names the work and connects it to a result activates the feeling-valued side of mattering in a way generic praise never will. This applies to formal recognition systems, but it shows up most powerfully in the everyday language managers use in one-on-ones, team meetings, and written feedback.
Close the loop on impact
Bucher et al.’s (2019) longitudinal study of digital workers found something counterintuitive: engagement was sustained not by social recognition, but by workers’ ability to construct a narrative of their own significance — to see how their work fit into something larger. The practical implication is straightforward. In most organizations, especially large or distributed ones, employees rarely see how their work lands. The deal closes, the customer outcome improves, the decision gets made, and the feedback loop back to the person who made it possible never closes. Reece et al. (2019) make a parallel point: workplace mattering is action-oriented and tied to perceived outcomes, which assumes those outcomes are actually visible to the person who produced them. Prilleltensky (2020) frames adding value as dependent on the structural conditions that make contributions legible. The fix is simple in concept: routinely surface downstream effects. Connect analysis to decisions, decisions to outcomes, individual work to customer or organizational impact. This is not about manufacturing significance — it is about removing the structural barriers that keep employees from seeing the significance their work already has.
Audit the distribution of attention
Mattering is unevenly distributed, often in ways leaders do not notice. Lombard and Cheryan (2024) found that gender disparities in workplace persistence and engagement are mediated by reduced mattering, not reduced belonging — particularly in male-dominated environments, where women could feel socially included while sensing their contributions were undervalued. Shore et al.’s (2011) Optimal Distinctiveness framework gives this pattern a name. Employees with high belongingness but low value-in-uniqueness are not genuinely included; they are “assimilated,” pressured to conform while their distinctive contributions go unrecognized. Filstad et al. (2019) add that belonging is built one interaction at a time — through hallway conversations, shared lunches, small rituals. The same is true of mattering, and disparities in who gets credited, cited, and visibly attributed accumulate the same way. A periodic audit of attention — who is named in updates, whose ideas surface in meetings, whose work appears in performance narratives — can reveal mattering deficits that have been compounding silently. Surfacing overlooked contributions is not an optional add-on. It is how organizations keep the assimilation pattern Shore et al. describe from quietly producing disengagement.
Design roles and systems so contribution is visible
R and Sujatha (2023) found that anti-mattering predicted reduced sustainable performance even among highly embedded employees, which points to a structural reality: interpersonal practices alone cannot fix mattering deficits built into how work is organized. When a role buries individual contribution inside team output, when reporting structures obscure who did what, or when performance management rewards only collective outcomes, mattering deficits get baked into the system. Bucher et al.’s (2019) digital labor research shows the extreme version. Platform workers described themselves as “cogs in a machine” and “anonymous numbers” (Salehi et al., 2015, as cited in Bucher et al., 2019) precisely because the system was designed to make individual contribution invisible. Richards et al. (2017) document a more familiar version in traditional workplaces: when role structures produce conflict and overload, perceived mattering drops and emotional exhaustion rises. The structural complement to recognition and feedback is to review how work is scoped, attributed, and reported. Performance systems, project documentation, attribution norms, and even meeting structures all carry signals about whose contributions count.
Watch for early signals of anti-mattering
Cultivating mattering is not only about active practices; it also requires watching for its absence. Karam et al. (2025) found that anti-mattering — the sense of being insignificant or unseen — predicted psychological distress and reduced well-being, with effects running through depressive and anxious symptoms. Giumetti and Kowalski (2024) report a similar pattern: higher depressive symptoms and lower life satisfaction among people who feel they do not matter. Flett et al. (2019) connect chronic feelings of not mattering to broader well-being deficits. In organizational terms, anti-mattering shows up first as withdrawal, exhaustion, and quiet disengagement, well before it shows up in attrition data. Richards et al. (2017) map the specific pathway: low mattering produces role stress, role stress produces emotional exhaustion, and emotional exhaustion produces reduced job satisfaction. By the time someone actually leaves, the chain has been running for a while. Engagement surveys, pulse checks, and exit interviews that explicitly ask about perceived contribution and recognition — not just belonging or general satisfaction — give organizations earlier and more actionable signals. The cost of catching anti-mattering only at the point of attrition is that the conditions that produced it stay in place for the next employee.
Taken together, these practices are individually familiar but collectively under-prioritized. The literature’s contribution is to reframe them, not as soft adjuncts to the “real” work of culture-building, but as the specific mechanism by which engagement, performance, and retention are sustained. They also operate at four different levels at once: interpersonal (recognition, feedback), structural (role design, performance systems), developmental (leadership training), and diagnostic (anti-mattering monitoring). That mirrors the multidimensional view of mattering advanced by Prilleltensky (2020) and Scarpa et al. (2022). Organizations that treat mattering as a single program risk producing the same gap the literature already identifies in belonging-only cultures: visible investment, modest return.
Discussion
The empirical record across these studies points in the same direction: mattering and belonging are related but distinct, and mattering is the more direct driver of the outcomes organizations actually care about. Shore et al.’s (2011) Optimal Distinctiveness framework establishes the theoretical foundation by treating belongingness and value in uniqueness as separate psychological needs. Lombard and Cheryan (2024) then confirm the distinction empirically, showing that reduced mattering — not reduced belonging — predicts disengagement from work. Reece et al. (2019), Bucher et al. (2019), Richards et al. (2017), and R and Sujatha (2023) each connect mattering, or its absence, to engagement, satisfaction, retention, and performance, with effects that hold even when belonging-adjacent factors are accounted for.
The implication for organizations is uncomfortable but important: investments in belonging and inclusion, while valuable, may not produce the engagement and retention outcomes leaders expect if they are pursued in isolation from the cultivation of mattering. An organization can host team lunches, publish values statements, and build inclusive hiring practices while simultaneously leaving employees questioning whether their specific contributions are seen. The research suggests that belonging makes work more enjoyable and relational, but mattering is what most directly drives retention, satisfaction, and performance. For leaders specifically, this elevates the everyday practices of acknowledgment, feedback, and individualized attention from “nice-to-haves” to core competencies.
Several directions for future research follow naturally. The most useful test of the argument advanced here would be an intervention study introducing the mattering-targeted practices outlined above into workplaces with already-strong belonging cultures, then measuring downstream effects on retention, engagement, and performance. Comparative work could also examine which levers — leadership development, contribution-specific recognition, impact loops, attentional equity, role and system design, or anti-mattering monitoring — produce the largest effects in different organizational contexts, since the literature does not yet rank them. A further open question is how these practices interact: whether structural changes (role design, performance systems) are necessary preconditions for interpersonal practices (recognition, feedback) to land, or whether the two operate independently.
The empirical case is increasingly clear: mattering matters. The more useful question is what changes when organizations begin treating it that way.
References
Bucher, E., Fieseler, C., & Lutz, C. (2019). Mattering in digital labor. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 34(4), 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-06-2018-0265
Ellington, L. M. (2023). Mattering: Shaping organizational leadership practices. International Journal of Adult Education and Technology, 14(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJAET.329603
Filstad, C., Traavik, L. E. M., & Gorli, M. (2019). Belonging at work: The experiences, representations, and meanings of belonging. Journal of Workplace Learning, 31(2), 116–142. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWL-06-2018-0081
Flett, G., Khan, A., & Su, C. (2019). Mattering and psychological well-being in college and university students: Review and recommendations for campus-based initiatives. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 17(3), 667–680. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-019-00073-6
Giumetti, G. W., & Kowalski, R. M. (2024). Mattering matters: Examining the moderating role of mattering in cyberbullying victimization–outcome relationships among college students. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 21(11), 1391. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph21111391
Karam, M. A., Hallit, R., Malaeb, D., Sakr, F., Dabbous, M., Fekih-Romdhane, F., Obeid, S., & Hallit, S. (2025). Psychological distress and wellbeing as mediators between anti-mattering. PLoS One, 20(10), e0334725. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0334725
Lombard, E. J., & Cheryan, S. (2024). Does my work matter? Reduced sense of mattering as a source of gender disparities. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12907
Prilleltensky, I. (2020). Mattering at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and politics. American Journal of Community Psychology, 65(1–2), 16–34. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12368
R, G. M., & Sujatha, S. (2023). The mediating role of contentment experience: Influence of job embeddedness on mattering and employee sustainable performance. International Journal of Professional Business Review, 8(5), e01993. https://doi.org/10.26668/businessreview/2023.v8i5.1993
Reece, A., Yaden, D., Kellerman, G., Robichaux, A., Goldstein, R., Schwartz, B., Seligman, M., & Baumeister, R. (2019). Mattering is an indicator of organizational health and employee success. The Journal of Positive Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1689416
Richards, K. A., Washburn, N. S., & Hemphill, M. A. (2017). Exploring the influence of perceived mattering, role stress, and emotional exhaustion on physical education teacher/coach job satisfaction. European Physical Education Review, 25(2), 389–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/1356336X17741402
Scarpa, M. P., Zopluoglu, C., & Prilleltensky, I. (2022). Assessing multidimensional mattering: Development and exploratory validation of the Mattering in Domains of Life Scale (MIDLS). Journal of Community Psychology, 50(3), 1430–1453. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.22725
Shore, L. M., Randel, A. E., Chung, B. G., Dean, M. A., Holcombe Ehrhart, K., & Singh, G. (2011). Inclusion and diversity in work groups: A review and model for future research. Journal of Management, 37(4), 1262–1289. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206310385943