Recovering from Workplace Offenses: Understanding the Roles of Resilience and Forgiveness

Workplace transgressions have been shown to have pervasive and detrimental consequences for employees and organizations. Given these negative consequences, past research has examined how managers and organizations can prevent transgressions from occurring in the first place (i.e., preventive approaches) and how transgressions can be fixed when they do eventually occur (i.e., remedial approaches). However, it is unlikely that transgressions can ever be fully eradicated from organizations and it is doubtful that providing remedies can fully redress the harm that was caused. Accordingly, it is important to complement the preventive and remedial approaches with a deeper understanding of how employees can effectively manage the aftermath of and successfully overcome workplace offenses – that is, to adopt a recovery approach to the study of workplace transgressions. My primary goal in this dissertation is to enhance our understanding of recovery by focusing on the roles of resilience and forgiveness. Manuscript 1 examines recovery as facilitated by a targeted intervention. Specifically, I examine whether a meaning-finding expressive writing intervention can promote resilience as well as positive outcomes for aggrieved individuals and their relationships. Manuscript 2 examines recovery as initiated by the individual. Adopting a person-centered perspective, I explore different forms of forgiveness that aggrieved individuals can experience and investigate whether some forgiveness-related experiences can be more beneficial than others. Overall, this dissertation contributes to enhancing our understanding of recovery and how it can be fostered. Theoretically, it offers insights into the processes and outcomes of recovery and suggests that while workplace transgressions can be unpleasant experiences, they can also be transformed into opportunities for experiencing positive outcomes. From a practical perspective, this dissertation provides employees and organizations with tools and knowledge that can be used to effectively manage the aftermath of workplace offenses