ABSTRACT
Although the topic of forgiveness has been slow to permeate the organizational sciences, recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the role of forgiveness in organizations. In this chapter, we review the organizational forgiveness literature, organized according to its theorized antecedents and consequences at the individual and organizational levels of analysis. Among our key takeaways we note that (a) many findings from the broader forgiveness literature generalize to the organizational context, (b) the organizational context introduces many unique research questions regarding the drivers of forgiveness, and (c) forgiveness is associated with many outcomes of fundamental importance to organizational scholars. In considering future research directions, we emphasize the importance of gathering stronger causal evidence for the antecedents and consequences of forgiveness across levels of analysis, examining the boundary conditions of forgiveness’s effects, considering national culture more deeply, and integrating forgiveness with the dispute-resolution and conflict-culture literatures.
