Assessing and attacking workplace incivility
Section snippets
Examining the phenomenon
To capture the essence of workplace incivility and describe its effects, we focus on five main issues: (1) defining workplace incivility, (2) profiling the instigator and the target of workplace incivility, (3) determining why incivility seems to be increasing in the workplace, and (4) uncovering the implications of incivility for employees and organizations, including (5) the effects of nonescalating, spiraling and cascading exchanges.
What can be done?
Repeatedly in our investigations we found that there was little organizational understanding of the nature and costs of incivility, and scant attention to curtailing or correcting such behavior. Three-fourths of the targets reported dissatisfaction with the ways in which their organizations handled the uncivil incidents and the aftermath, yet many of these same targets told us that they never officially reported the incident to their organizations. Also, it is important to remember that similar
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our appreciation to James Marine for enhancing the executive perspective of this manuscript.
Christine Pearson is a Research Professor at the Kenan–Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her doctorate in business administration from the University of Southern California.
Pearson was formerly associate director and senior research scientist of the Center for Crisis Management at USC. She is the co-author of three books on the topic of organizational crisis management. She has consulted to a broad industrial sample of Fortune 500 and public
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Christine Pearson is a Research Professor at the Kenan–Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her doctorate in business administration from the University of Southern California.
Pearson was formerly associate director and senior research scientist of the Center for Crisis Management at USC. She is the co-author of three books on the topic of organizational crisis management. She has consulted to a broad industrial sample of Fortune 500 and public sector organizations, and lectures internationally on such topics as executive kidnapping, product tampering, environmental contamination, media management, and threats to organizational reputation. Her interest in workplace incivility emanated from her research on workplace violence, in an attempt to pursue the root causes of this phenomenon. She is currently working on her fourth book, Rued Behavior: Downstream in a Hostile Workplace.
Lynne Andersson is an assistant professor in the Fox School of Business and Management at Temple University in Philadelphia. She teaches courses in “Business, Society, and Ethics” and “Social Responsibility in Business.” Her research interests focus on individual attitudes and behaviors in the workplace, particularly those of a deviant nature and related to pressing business-society issues. In particular, she has published her research on employee cynicism, environmental activism, and incivility in academic journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, and Journal of Organizational Behavior. In her pre-Ph.D. life she was a techie, working as a statistical programmer and an information systems consultant for several companies in the southeastern U.S.
Christine Porath is a doctoral candidate at Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research interests focus on individual behaviors in the workplace, at both the positive and negative ends of the spectrum. Her research concentrates on incivility in the workplace, as well as individual self-management. Porath’s dissertation is on individual self-management, focusing on a range of motivational and emotional skills and their impact on organizationally relevant outcomes. Before her Ph.D. days, Chris worked at International Management Group (IMG), the largest sports marketing and management organization in the world.