Forgiveness among Public Sector Workers: A Predictive Study of Employee Resilience, Emotional Intelligence and Loneliness at Work

Abstract

The gains of organizational wellbeing and productivity have been challenged by workers disposition especially the heart of forgiving one another within the workplace. The present study investigated forgiveness among public sector workers: a predictive study of employee resilience, emotional intelligence and loneliness at work. Participants in the study were made up of non-academic staff of Nnamdi Azikiwe University. They comprise of 78 males (43.09%) and 103 females (56.91%) with a mean age of 39.77 years and a standard deviation of 7.9 years and age ranges from 28 -65 years. Four different instruments were used to measure the four variables; Resilience, Loneliness, Emotional Intelligence and Forgiveness. The Rye’s Forgiveness Scale was used to measure forgiveness among the participants; Wagnild and Young’ Resilience scale (WYRS) was used to measure resilience; UCLA Loneliness Scale (ULS) was used to measure loneliness while Wong’s Emotional Intelligence scale (WEIS) measured the participants’ emotional intelligence. The design adopted for this study is the correlational design and the statistical method used is the multiple regression technique. The results of the hypotheses tested showed that that there is insignificant relationship between resilience and forgiveness (β=.052 p>.05), the regression results shown in Table 2 show that there is insignificant relationship between loneliness and forgiveness (β=.030, p>.05), there was also a significant relationship between emotional intelligence and forgiveness (β= .500, p<.05) and the overall significance of the effect as shown in Table 3 showed that there was an overall significance between forgiveness and the selected predictors F (3,177)= 3.126, p<.05. It was however recommended that Personnel Managers should inculcate improvement in psychological factors like emotional intelligence in their personnel training agenda so as to improve the individuals’ tendency to forgive coworkers in the workplace.