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Organizational Punishment of Transgressors Elicits Third-Party Forgiveness Behavior

Sarah Jensen
Sarah Jensen
Kristina Diekmann
Kristina Diekmann
Kristina Diekmann
Kristina Diekmann
Kristina Diekmann
All your life you’re told forgiveness is for you. But we’re never told why it’s for you. It means you’re working on owning your life.
Shani Tran
Therapist and Founder, The Shani Project
Forgiveness is nothing less than the way we heal the world. We heal the world by healing each and every one of our hearts. The process is simple, but it is not easy.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
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Organizational Punishment of Transgressors Elicits Third-Party Forgiveness Behavior

Sarah Jensen
Sarah Jensen
Kristina Diekmann
Kristina Diekmann
Kristina Diekmann
Kristina Diekmann
Kristina Diekmann
NO. of participants
Date
2025
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Empiricism
open access
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No
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In this paper, we build on deontic justice theory by examining third-party forgiveness as a downstream deontic response to organizational justice repair. Across two studies (N = 690), we find that when organizations punish transgressors, third parties are more likely to forgive the transgressor and are more likely to want to interact with the transgressor. We find that this effect is driven by a decrease in perceptions of injustice and a decrease in beliefs about future harm to oneself and others. This work has implications for our understanding of third parties’ reactions to organizational justice repair and workplace conflict more broadly.

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