Benevolent but unprincipled: How forgiving workplace mistreatment affects trust in the victim

Abstract

Five studies (plus three supplemental studies) illustrate that a victim’s decision to forgive or not forgive workplace mistreatment affects people’s trust in the victim. In contrast to what existing work on forgiveness would seem to predict, we observe no overall relationship between forgiveness and trust in the victim. Rather, when victims forgive workplace mistreatment it boosts impressions of their benevolence but harms impressions of their integrity. This finding emerged across different types and severity of workplace mistreatment and when the victim received an apology from the transgressor. It also had downstream consequences, affecting the tasks for which people thought the victim would be best suited. Participants thought forgiving victims were less concerned about defending the moral principle the transgressor violated. This inference mediated the negative effect of forgiveness on the victim’s perceived integrity. Further supporting this mechanism, forgiveness affected inferences about a victim’s integrity less when the victim was harmed because the transgressor acted incompetently rather than unethically and when the organization provided restorative reparations for the mistreatment. Overall, these findings challenge common wisdom about forgiveness and trust and highlight a critical dilemma that victims face when deciding how to respond to being mistreated at work.

Keywords: Forgiveness, trust, integrity, benevolence, morality, transgression, victim, preregistered, open-science