To Err Is Human, To Forgive Is Divine. Abusive Bosses and Turnover Intention: The Moderating Effect of Employee Forgiveness

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-968-1_16How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Forgiveness; Abusive leadership; Turnover intention

Abstract

Abusive leaders are a nightmare to work under. As expected, employees who are unwilling to face this nightmare anymore resign as soon as the opportunity presents itself. This is a growing concern because despite the good intentions of shareholders and top management to retain high performing employees, the presence of abusive leaders may sometimes go under the radar and still be prevalent within the organization. This complication arises because abusive leaders may only show their ‘true colors’ to their subordinates but hide these abusive behaviors from the higher ups. Thus, it may not be possible to completely root out abusive leadership within an organization. As at the time of writing there is a lack of studies that examine the beneficial moderating effect of employee forgiveness on abusive leadership and turnover intention. The current paper therefore proposes a framework whereby employees who are more likely to forgive their leaders report lower turnover intentions. Because employee forgiveness is a trainable aspect, an important implication of this is that organizations should invest in workshops that teach employees how to properly manage conflict and to forgive and stay focused on the job. Although it may take some time for an abusive leader to be properly dismissed by HR after the issue has reached higher-ups, at least the organization is able to retain its high-performing employees rather than lose them over the short-term.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Teh Hong-Leong
AU  - Ng Shwu-Shing
AU  - Norhayati Md Isa
AU  - Farhana Hanim
AU  - Shanthi Nadarajah
AU  - Hatijah Md Salleh
AU  - Norharyani Adrus
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/28
TI  - To Err Is Human, To Forgive Is Divine. Abusive Bosses and Turnover Intention: The Moderating Effect of Employee Forgiveness
BT  - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Business, Accounting, Finance and Economics (BAFE 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 219
EP  - 223
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-968-1_16
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-968-1_16
ID  - Hong-Leong2025
ER  -