Keynote speaker

Speaker: Dr. D. Ramona Bobocel

As a Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Dr. Bobocel’s research focuses on fairness/justice in the workplace, forgiveness, and ethical decision making. Her work has been published in leading scientific journals, including Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Nature Human Behaviour. She has received numerous awards for her scientific contributions, including the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award, and recognized as a Fellow in both the Association for Psychological Sciences and Canadian Psychological Association. She has supervised 60 student theses across the PhD, MA, and undergraduate levels. Dr. Bobocel received her PhD from Western University.  

Abstract: Forgiveness in the Workplace

Interpersonal forgiveness has long been associated with a number of benefits for victims of transgressions—such as greater mental health and well-being—as well as for victim-offender relationships. The established benefits of forgiveness in the context of close relationships have motivated scholars to extend the study of forgiveness to the workplace. In this talk, I will review research from my laboratory in which we have examined motivational and cognitive mechanisms as well as contextual factors that promote forgiveness in the workplace. I will also discuss more recent research in which we and others have begun to examine nuances of forgiveness, including when and why it may result in intrapersonal and interpersonal costs. Altogether, our research reinforces the idea that, just as in close relationships, forgiveness in the workplace is a complex phenomenon, one that is best conceptualized both as an outcome and as the beginning of a process.