Expressing forgiveness after interpersonal mistreatment: Power and status of forgivers influence transgressors' relationship restoration efforts

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2432
• Author: Marius Dijke,Michelle Xue Zheng
• Date: 01 October 2020
• Published date: 01 October 2020

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Expressing forgiveness after interpersonal mistreatment:

Power and status of forgivers influence transgressors'

relationship restoration efforts

Michelle Xue Zheng

1

| Marius van Dijke

2,3

1

Department of Organizational Behavior and

Human Resource Management, China Europe

International Business School (CEIBS),

Shanghai, China

2

Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus

University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

3

Nottingham Business School, Nottingham

Trent University, Nottingham, England

Correspondence

Michelle Xue Zheng, Department of

Organizational Behavior and Human Resource

Management, China Europe International

Business School (CEIBS), Hong Feng Road

699, Shanghai 201206, China.

Email: zhengxue.academic@gmail.com

Summary

One adverse consequence of interpersonal mistreatment is that it damages the rela-

tionship between the victim and the transgressor. Scholars have promoted forgive-

ness of such mistreatment as a victim response that can motivate transgressors to

work towards relationship restoration. Building on social exchange theory and the

social perception literature, we provide an account of when transgressors are less

(vs. more) willing to restore their relationship with the victim in response to forgive-

ness. Specifically, we argue that transgressors perceive forgiveness from a victim

who has high (vs. low) power, relative to the transgressor, as insincere, making trans-

gressors less willing to restore the relationship. We further argue that this effect of

high (vs. low) victim power is pronounced especially when the victim also has low

(vs. high) status. Two experiments and two field studies support these predictions.

These findings highlight the relevance of studying how contextual conditions color

transgressors' perceptions of victims' behavior to understand relationship restoration

after interpersonal mistreatment.

KEYWORDS

forgiveness, hierarchy, interpersonal mistreatment, power, relationship restoration, sincerity,

status

1|INTRODUCTION

Interpersonal mistreatment is a common adverse experience for many

organization members (Bies & Moag, 1986; Colquitt, 2001;

Greenberg, 1993; Hershcovis, Cameron, Gervais, & Bozeman, 2018).

It is defined as “a specific antisocial variety of organizational deviance,

involving a situation in which at least one organizational member

takes counternormative negative actions—or terminates normative

positive actions—against another member”(p. 247; Cortina & Magley,

2003). Such mistreatment can range from mild social slights such as

offensive jokes to disrespect and general incivility and even to serious

harassment and violence (Cortina & Magley, 2003; Lim & Cortina,

2005). Interpersonal mistreatment damages the relationship between

the victim and the transgressor (Hershcovis & Barling, 2010), thus

thwarting the victim's belongingness needs (O'Reilly, Robinson,

Berdahl, & Banki, 2009), damaging his/her self-esteem (Penhaligon,

Louis, & Restubog, 2009), and even promoting deviant victim behav-

iors (Hershcovis & Barling, 2010).

One victim response that may facilitate restoring the victim–

transgressor relationship following interpersonal mistreatment is

forgiveness (Fehr & Gelfand, 2012; Goodstein & Aquino, 2010; Ren &

Gray, 2009). Forgiveness is defined as “the internal act of

relinquishing anger, resentment, and the desire to seek revenge

against someone who has caused harm as well as the enhancement of

Received: 30 September 2018 Revised: 3 January 2020 Accepted: 8 January 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2432

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reprodu ction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Organizational Behavior published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

782 J Organ Behav. 2020;41:782–796.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job