Examining Motivational Profiles of Forgiveness in the Workplace: An Employee-Centered Approach

Forgiveness is often conceptualized as an ethical response to workplace transgressions with the potential to repair strained relationships between organizational members. However, the act of forgiveness is not always accompanied by prosocial intentions; scholars have theorized that there is a qualitative difference between forgiveness that genuinely expresses an internal sentiment of benevolence versus forgiveness that is expressed but lacks corresponding prosocial intent. Despite this acknowledgment, we still lack a framework for understanding and organizing the full range of internal and external motivations that may give rise to forgiveness in its different forms. In the current research, we present a novel motivational perspective on forgiveness. Drawing on self-determination theory and adopting an employee-centered approach, we adapted a measure of forgiveness motivation and conducted a latent profile analysis to determine motivational subgroups in a sample of working adults (N = 604), as well as the antecedents and associated indicators of forgiveness. Results show that external pressures to forgive are associated with more controlled motivation, which translates into acts of forgiveness lacking interpersonal benevolence and positive sentiment that follow from more autonomous forgiveness motivation. These findings promote a more nuanced understanding of forgiveness following workplace transgressions that better reflect these motivational drivers, their unique antecedents, and their phenomenological consequences.