The Impact Of Perceived Organizational Support On The Tendency Of Workplace Forgiveness

Due to the increasing of task complexity and need of cooperation, interpersonal conflict in the workplace becomes a hot point. More and more researchers and practitioners of management pay attention to what means can be used to resolve conflicts, establish a harmonious culture in organization or company and improve the quality of work relationships. Fortunately, workplace forgiveness(WF) which is also a kind of restorative justice, provides a positive way to avoid the escalation of conflicts.Forgiveness is usually translated into KUAN SHU in the existing a few studies about forgiveness in Chinese mainland, while in this study we consider it much more appropriate to translate it into KUAN RONG when taking the background of culture, the boundary of conflict occurring time, the attributes of conflicts and the meaning of practice into consideration. In this study, WF is defined as an interpersonal behavior with the prosocial intention to let go of others’ wrongdoings when working.Existing studies reveal that forgiveness can be divided into two distinct dimensions, intrapsychic state and interpersonal act. In this study we suggest that intrapsychic state can be further divided into tendency of emotion-oriented forgiveness and tendency of relation-oriented forgiveness. Tendency of relation-oriented forgiveness which is kind of inner processing of thinking of maintaining the relationship between transgressor and victim is consistent with interpersonal act which can also be recognized as relation-oriented forgiving behavior. Thus, WF can be understood as having two dimensions: emotion-oriented forgiveness(including tendency of emotion-oriented forgiveness) and relation-oriented forgiveness(including both tendency of relation-oriented forgiveness and relation-oriented forgiving behavior). Also, both of the two dimensions can be considered orthogonal; that is they are in principle independent of each other, and so the actual situation may contain either, or both, or neither.Also different from existing studies, this study suggests that benefits caring, work support and value identity constituting perceived organizational support can be recognized as two aspects. Benefits caring and work support are both original perception of actual reality while value identity is a perception based on the processing of original perception.Structural equation modeling based on partial least squares is applied to test the impact of perceived organizational support on tendency of WF(both tendency of relation-oriented forgiveness and tendency of relation-oriented forgiveness are included). Three main conclusions are concluded as follows.(1) Empirical tests suggest that the three dimensions of perceived organizational support come from two aspects and that tendency of WF consists of two dimensions, which are tendency of emotion-oriented forgiveness and tendency of relation-oriented forgiveness respectively.(2) Benefits caring has no direct impact on tendency of WF. Benefits caring directly affects value identity and also, value identity directly influences tendency of WF. Though value identity is not the mediator between benefits caring and tendency of WF, it indeed plays a role of go-between in the indirect effect.(3) There is a mediating effect of value identity between work support and tendency of WF. Furthermore, value identity plays a role of partial mediator between work support and tendency of emotion-oriented forgiveness; meanwhile, it also acts as a full mediator between work support and tendency of relation-oriented forgiveness.