How can organizations mitigate the negative impact of leader transgressions on employee outcomes and foster forgiveness? This has been one of the major questions in the leadership and ethics literature. Previous research has identified several answers to this inquiry, but it is still unknown what happens when authoritarian leaders who possess a formal authority and legitimate power in organizations engage in transgressions toward their employees. Employees may perceive that leaders show these offenses either to enhance their performance (i.e., performance promotion) or to purposely harm them (i.e., injury). Yet, under what circumstances employees make these attributions is not clear. To this end, the current study proposes employee attributions as cognitive mediating mechanisms and severity of an offense as a moderator shaping these attributions and the resulting forgiveness reactions. A three-wave field study was carried out with 217 white-collar employees. The results revealed that the severity of an offense conducted by an authoritarian leader shaped the attributions of followers regarding the leader’s intentions for committing the transgression and their forgiveness tendencies. Specifically, followers were less likely to forgive authoritarian leaders for major and severe offenses, as they attributed these transgressions to intentions to harm. Yet, minor and less severe offenses displayed by authoritarian leaders were forgiven since they were attributed to performance promotion motive. Our research contributes to leadership, attribution and forgiveness literatures by pointing to some unethical consequences of authoritarian leader transgressions and implying some solutions to mitigate them.

Keywords: Authoritarian leadership; Leader transgressions; Performance promotion motive; Injury initiation motive; Forgiveness.