Luther College professor says forgiveness skills pay off for business employees

Is forgiveness good for business?  Luther College professor Loren Toussaint and some of his colleagues have just completed studying that question.

In what they believe to be the first-ever attempt to teach forgiveness skills to business employees, Toussaint and others conducted a 6 to 12-month program at Ameriprise Financial focused on forgiveness and emotional intelligence training.  89 financial service advisors, 9 vice presidents, and 6 administrative assistants volunteered to be in the program.

Four groups received a 9-hour workshop and 6 support phone calls approximately every 2 months over a 1 year period of time. Two other groups received the workshop and 6 phone calls approximately every 3 to 4 weeks over a 6-month period of time. The last group was a control group.

Employees who completed the program saw their sales productivity go up 24 percent compared to employees not attending the program, who saw sales productivity go up 10 percent.  For Ameriprise employees completing the program, there were also meaningful decreases in stress (23 percent) and anger (13 percent) and increases in positive states (20 percent), health-related quality of life (10 percent), and physical vitality (9 percent). There was, however, no quality of life data from the group of employees not completing the program to offer any comparison.

More information about the research project is available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0890117119866957e