As a salaried employee, you may be paid money to perform the duties in your position; but you still gain internal social capital by doing above average work (or go into debt by failing to perform at the bare minimum standards).

It would be hard to get it right, though. First, you not always have the freedom to pick which projects get assigned to. More importantly, there is no quid-pro-quo in the social dimension, so I cannot really see how to "demand more recognition" for completing an "unpleasant but valuable" task.