A VP I worked with had a director on her team who'd thrown her under the bus in a leadership offsite. Six months later, the director was still on the team, the work was still getting done, and she told me everything was "fine."
It wasn't. Every meeting she ran with him was a degree colder than the last. She wasn't punishing him. She just hadn't forgiven him — and her whole team could feel the temperature drop.
Most management advice on situations like this is some version of "move past it." That's not advice. That's a hope. The actual research is more useful — and more demanding.
In a 2019 study published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Radulovic, Thomas, Epitropaki, and Legood ran three separate studies across organizations in four countries to test what forgiveness actually does inside leader–follower relationships. Their finding: forgiveness isn't a personal virtue you happen to bring to work. It's a relationship maintenance strategy — and when it's missing, even high-quality manager-employee relationships quietly degrade.
Forgiveness isn't a personal virtue you bring to work. It's a relationship maintenance strategy.
A few specifics worth knowing.
The transgressions leaders are most often failing to forgive aren't dramatic. They're the everyday ones: negligence, dishonesty, incompetence, interpersonal sabotage (Shapiro et al., 2011). Forgiveness, in the research definition, is not forgetting and it is not condoning. It's a "prosocial shift toward the offender" — a deliberate decision to stop letting the injury dictate how you behave toward this person.
And it pays off measurably. Across the Radulovic studies, leaders and followers who engaged in forgiveness reported higher job satisfaction, higher self-esteem, and lower negative affect — mediated by what the authors call "relational efforts," the small repair behaviors that emerge once the resentment loosens its grip.
The kicker: it works far better when the surrounding culture supports it. The researchers call this a "forgiveness climate." If your organization treats every misstep as a permanent mark on someone's record, individual forgiveness alone can't carry the weight. The leader's job isn't just to forgive — it's to build a team where repair is possible in the first place.
For Your Next 1:1
- Is there someone on my team I'm working around rather than with? What was the original transgression?
- Have I confused forgiveness with forgetting — or with letting it slide?
- Do my own behaviors signal that mistakes can be repaired here, or that they go on a permanent record?
- What's one small "relational effort" I could make this week toward a relationship I've quietly written off?
Forgiveness in leadership isn't softness. It's the work of keeping a team functional after the inevitable moment when someone lets someone else down. The leaders who do it well aren't naïve. They're durable.