Understanding Workplace Forgiveness: Associations with Safety Climate and Organisational Trust

Abstract

Conflicts are inevitable in work relationships among colleagues and have various negative outcomes. One approach to deal with inevitable work conflicts is forgiveness. This study investigated whether there was a correlation between psychosocial safety climate and forgiveness. In addition to that, this study also examines if organisational trust plays a mediating role in the relationship. The sample included 114 employees from various organisations across the globe with an age range of 20-63 years old. This research conducted descriptive statistics, correlations, and mediation analysis by PROCESS v3.5 with SPSS to test the hypotheses. The results suggest that there was a positive association between psychosocial safety climate and forgiveness with organisational trust as mediating role in the relationship. There was no significant effect between psychosocial safety climate and forgiveness directly. In exploratory analyses, it showed that severity and relationship quality were significantly associated with forgiveness. The results revealed that psychosocial safety climate, including organisational trust, may be fundamental to foster the forgiveness climate in the workplace. Future research needs to be conducted to complement this current study and to broaden the understanding of workplace forgiveness antecedents, especially in the safe working environment area