Repairing damaged professional relationships with leader apologies: An examination of trust and forgiveness

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of different leader apology expressions in restoring workplace relationships after transgressions. We propose that “ideal” apology expressions, such as those that are sincere, can act as signals that the transgressing leader is trustworthy and that the relationship between the victim and offender is safe to restore through forgiveness. We support this contention with findings from four studies. In a hypothetical scenario involving a mid-level leader’s transgression (Study 1), we found that a sincere apology expression was the most effective at facilitating forgiveness compared to alternative expressions (basic, amends, remorse, responsibility, insincere). Additional field studies (Studies 2a and 2b) and an experiment that manipulated leader trust (Study 3) also supported the role of a sincere apology in facilitating forgiveness through the mechanism of increased leader trust. Our findings have implications for leadership theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• apology
• forgiveness
• leadership
• transgression
• signaling theory
• organizational behavior

Acknowledgements

Special thank you and acknowledgements to Julian Barling, Gerben Van Kleef, Mayowa Babalola, Tony Carroll, Heather Dezan, Duygu Gulseren, Paul Levy, and Catie Phares for their assistance and feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no financial or non-financial conflicts of interest.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Dataset availability

The data for this research is available from the authors upon request.

Ethics approval

This research received Institutional Review Board approval and meets ethical standards for the treatment of human participants.

Notes

1. To better understand and compare leader apologies given the different operationalizations in the literature, we conducted a review of research on this topic and identified a variety of apology expressions that have been studied. These expressions, which are listed in Table 1, include minimal basic apologies without explanation or embellishment (simply stating “I’m sorry”), offers of compensation related to attempts to make amends for harm-done (e.g., “recompense offer” in Byrne et al., 2014; “compensation” in; Fehr & Gelfand, 2010), expressions of remorse (which differ from sincere expressions in that they must be perceived as such according to Schumann, 2012), sincere apologies (also referred to as “honesty expressions” in Basford et al., 2014, “apology/no apology” in; Tucker et al., 2006, or “higher quality” expressions), and expressions of responsibility (as seen in Byrne et al., 2014). To ensure consistency in our analysis, we proposed the following integrative labels for these apology expressions: basic expression, amends expression, remorse expression, responsibility expression, and sincere expression. These labels and their definitions are summarized in Table 2.

2. To compute this power score, we used the effect size estimate of .42 from Fehr et al. (2010) meta-analysis.

3. A pre-study with 60 undergraduate participants from a mid-sized university in the United States verified the success of the trust manipulation on measures of affective trust.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Centre for Advanced Leadership in Business enabled this collaboration.