TITLE:
Work Interpersonal Relationships: Cognitive Appraisals and the Prediction of Dispositional Forgiveness and Satisfaction of Life and Work
AUTHORS:
Georgia Stephanou, Stamatia Giorgali
KEYWORDS:
Workplace Interpersonal Relationships, Attributions, Forgiveness, Life Satisfaction, Work Satisfaction
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.11 No.12,
December
29,
2020
ABSTRACT: This study examined the employees’ attributions for their subjectively perceived interpersonal relationships with their colleagues as best or worst, and the role of dispositional forgiveness (self, other, situations) in predicting the perceived quality and the attributions of the same interpersonal relationships, as well as the extent to which life satisfaction and work satisfaction were predictive of the same appraisals of the relationships. The participants were 200 secondary school teachers, of both genders, who were members of the current organization for at least 2 years. The results revealed that 1) the best interpersonal relationships were mainly attributed to internal, personal controllable, stable and self-colleague controllable factors, whereas the worst interpersonal relationships were predominately attributed to external, personal uncontrollable and colleagues’ controllable factors, and mainly locus of causality discriminated the two groups of relationships, 2) employees who were higher forgiving (mainly, situations) enjoyed more their best- and suffered less their worst-colleaguing relationships than the employees who were comparatively lower in forgiving 3) high forgiving teachers made adaptive attributional appraisals for the worst and, particularly, best interpersonal relationships, 4) the valence of the prediction of forgiveness of self, of other and of situations varied between and within the attributional dimensions as well as it varied between and within worst and best interpersonal relationships and 5) relative to forgiveness, life satisfaction, and, particularly, work satisfaction were weak predictors of the appraisals of the colleaguing relationships, mainly in the worst. Implication of these results in workplace and personal well-being are discussed.