Search results

This paper examines how nurses differentially respond, both emotionally and behaviorally, to incivility from coworkers (i.e. other healthcare staff) and from their patients. Specifically, the authors explore how coworker and patient incivility distinctly influence the extent to which nurses engage in emotional labor, which in turn, may impact nurses' safety performance. The authors further examine how nurses' hostile attribution biases exacerbate and mitigate these effects.

A three-week longitudinal study was conducted with 187 nurses in which they reported their experiences with incivility, surface and deep acting, hostile attribution biases and safety performance (i.e. safety compliance and participation).

Patient incivility led to more surface acting across all nurses. Further, the effects of coworker incivility on emotional labor strategies were conditional on nurses' hostile attribution biases (HAB). Specifically, coworker incivility led to more surface acting among nurses higher on HAB, and coworker incivility led to less deep acting among those lower on HAB. Finally, surface acting was associated with reduced safety participation, and deep acting was associated with greater safety compliance and safety participation.

The nursing context allowed the current research to extend understanding about how incivility affects an unexplored outcome—safety performance. The current research also offers a rare examination of the effects of incivility from multiple sources (i.e. coworkers and patients) and demonstrates the different processes through which incivility from these different sources impacts nurses' ability to perform safely.

Workplace incivility is a common deviant behavior happening in organizational contexts, and it can have serious negative consequences such as decreasing employees’ organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and increasing their turnover intentions. This study aims to test the argument that emotional exhaustion and acceptability of workplace incivility can act as mediators in this relationship between incivility and OCB and turnover intentions. Moreover, the assumption that employees’ political skill can act as a buffer on job strain caused by incivility displayed by both coworkers and supervisors was tested.

In total, 703 South Korean employees recruited online completed a self-assessment on their political skill first and then they were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions: either recalled a co-worker or a supervisor who had previously displayed uncivil behaviors toward them.

The stronger the employees’ experience of incivility, the lower their OCB-O and the higher their turnover intentions. These relationships were mediated by acceptability of incivility and emotional exhaustions. Interestingly, results also supported the moderating role of political skill on the relationship between incivility and turnover intentions mediated by acceptability, with higher politically skilled employees being more likely to accept incivility when compared to lower politically skilled employees.

Using a between-subjects design, the findings expand the current knowledge regarding the negative impacts of workplace incivility. Specifically, they showed that acceptability is an important mechanism to understand the impact of workplace incivility on OCB and turnover intention.

The purpose of this study is to present an empirical account of the prevalence and socio-demographic determinants of workplace incivility (experienced and instigated) in the Indian workplace.

The study sample consisted of 1,133 employees working in service organizations mainly banks, hotels, academic institutions and information technology firms. The authors tested the proposed model on the same set of respondents in two different studies. The phenomenon of instigated incivility and its determinants were examined in Study 1, while Study 2 looked at experienced incivility and its antecedents. The data were analyzed using univariate, bivariate, and multivariate statistical operations in SPSS 24.

The results of both studies revealed that employees’ age, gender, educational qualification, position, nature of the organization, type of the organization and duration of working hours significantly predict the onset of workplace incivility. Nevertheless, marital status and tenure failed to predict the manifestation of uncivil behaviors in the organization.

The scope of this study was restricted to the Indian service sector with a focus on only two types of workplace incivility (instigated and experienced).

The managers are advised to be mindful of employees’ socio-demographic differences while devising interventions to tackle the issues of uncivil acts at work.

This study is one of the pioneer attempts to explore the impact of socio-demographic factors on employees’ tendency to instigate and experience incivility at work in India. In doing so, the study enriches the scant literature on workplace incivility by establishing the role of individual differences in determining the occurrence of incivility in the workplace.

This study aims to investigate the influence of supervisor incivility on employees’ general self-efficacy and engagement and their mediating roles in a relationship between supervisor incivility and employees’ service delivery. The study also explores how gender (dis)similarities between supervisors and subordinates affect these relationships.

A total of 276 frontline hotel employees in the US Midwest participated in the study. The research model was examined through a two-step structural equation modeling.

The study findings suggest that an uncivil supervisor negatively influences hotel employees’ self-efficacy and engagement level, which served as underlying mechanisms connecting supervisor incivility with reduced service delivery. The findings did not support the moderating role of gender (dis)similarity.

The results of the current study should urge organizations to acknowledge the detrimental impact of workplace incivility and to commit to the prevention and termination of employee mistreatment. Organizations make efforts to ensure that supervisors serve their internal customers with support and gratitude and help enhance employees’ psychological resources.

The current study advanced the body of literature by suggesting an integral psychological underlying mechanism linking uncivil treatment and declined performance in the hospitality industry.

Using observational and experimental designs, the purpose of this study was to explore if the power relation between the offender and the victim of incivility and the level of perceived severity of the incivility were associated with bystanders’ intentions to help when witnessing workplace incivility.

In Study 1, 160 participants completed a questionnaire where they described a recent uncivil incident they had witnessed, and completed measures of perceived severity and measures of their behavioural response as bystanders. In Study 2, 183 participants were randomised to read one of two vignettes (a manager being uncivil towards a subordinate or vice versa), and completed measures of perceived severity and of their motivation to intervene. The authors investigated whether the power relation between perpetrator and victim, and the perceived severity of the uncivil exchange, were associated with prosocial bystander behaviours in Study 1 and with motivation to defend the victim of incivility in Study 2.

Higher perpetrator power was significantly associated with the incident being perceived as more severe, and higher perpetrator power was directly related to greater tendency to confront, and lower tendency to avoid, the perpetrator. Perpetrator power was indirectly associated with social support according to the perceived severity. A supervisor acting in an uncivil manner was rated as more severe than a subordinate acting in such a way. Perceived severity mediated the relationship between perpetrator power and the witness’s introjected, identified and intrinsic motivation to intervene.

This study extends previous work by investigating how the perpetrator’s power influences both the bystander’s prosocial behaviour and their motivation to defend the victim. Furthermore, previous research has not considered how perceptions of severity might mediate the relationship between power, behaviour and motivation.

Customer incivility is commonplace across service industries. Yet, there is little that is known about how uncivil customers affect employees. The purpose of this study is to examine how uncivil customer interactions affect employees’ cynicism, depersonalization and job performance.

Study 1 uses the qualitative critical incident technique to content analyze employee perceptions of customer incivility and how it affects their job performance. Study 2 uses a 2 (incivility frequency: high vs low) × 2 (co-worker support: high vs low) × 2 (service rule commitment: high vs low) quasi-experimental between-subjects design.

Results find that there is a significant interaction effect of customer incivility frequency, co-worker emotional support and service rule commitment on employee cynicism and depersonalization, which leads to decreased job performance and more harmful experiences to other customers.

The findings provide practical implications on the importance of managing customer incivility, providing co-worker support and how this affects employee attitudes and service they deliver to other customers.

The results build upon the incivility, co-worker support and service rule commitment literature, conservation of resources theory, as well as identifying key variables core to hospitality and tourism research: cynicism and depersonalization that provide important implications for actions of tourism and hospitality firms.

Given the harmful effects of workplace incivility and the calls for revealing the antecedents of instigated incivility, this study examines how employee-instigated incivility unfolds as a result of negative mood contagion from leaders to employees.

Drawing upon affective events theory, the authors hypothesized that leader negative mood is contagious and has an indirect relationship with employee-instigated incivility through employee negative mood. For hypothesis testing, data were collected from 243 leader-employee dyads and tested using bootstrapped mediation analysis.

As hypothesized, leader negative mood was associated with employee-instigated incivility indirectly through employee negative mood. This finding supports that negative mood of the leader is contagious and might unintendedly trigger employee-instigated incivility toward other at work.

Given the cross-sectional design of this study, causal inferences could not be drawn. The direction of relationships between the variables is based on the theoretical assumptions, rather than a test of the causal ordering of the variables.

This study advances the limited literature on the antecedents of employee-instigated incivility by demonstrating the impact of negative mood experienced by leaders on uncivil behaviors of employees.

Workplace incivility has been identified as a specific form of social mistreatment causing distress despite its low intensity. Research on workplace incivility has touched on a variety of personal and contextual factors associated with incivility’s prevalence including research on both antecedents and outcomes. The research has been especially concerned with identifying a wide range of negative consequences of incivility, including various occupational, interpersonal, and health-related implications. Theoretical explorations have considered links of incivility to sexism and racism, and its reflection of attachment styles, as well as its inherent connection with the stressor-emotion model of counterproductive work behavior (Spector & Fox, 2005). The power of incivility to elicit distress has been attributed to its capacity to signal riskiness of social situations that thwart core social motives (i.e., self-control). Intervention research has been relatively rare, but progress is evident.

In the current study framework, the authors test the underlying assumptions of affective events theory concerning the impact of job satisfaction and job insecurity driven by incivility on intrapreneurial behaviour.

Data were collected with a sample of 510 employees from five organisations. All hypotheses were tested via SmartPLS3. Additionally, a distinction between formative and reflective measures was performed.

Findings revealed that incivility decreases intrapreneurial behaviour, mediated by job satisfaction and job insecurity. Additionally, this study’s results show that the relationship between job satisfaction and job insecurity and intrapreneurial behaviour distinguishes unionised employees from employees who are not unionised.

The cross-sectional nature of the present data precluded definitive statements about causality. Additionally, further studies should increase the sample size and include an international perspective to ensure the overall generalisability of the results.

Practically, this study’s findings point to the need for organisational management to understand better underlying employees' perceptions and their antecedents and consequences.

The study results contribute to the literature by testing the core assumptions of affective events theory and by extending the affective events theory model, incorporating contextual influences on the relationship between attitudes and behaviours. The authors also show for the first time that incivility can be directly (compared to indirectly) linked to emotional-based responses, but not to those responses driven by cognitive appraisals. Thus, the study also contributes to the incivility literature and the understanding of various antecedents and consequences of incivility. Additionally, this study addressed the notion of formative versus reflective measurement models for the first time relating to incivility and intrapreneurial behaviour, allowing for more sensitive and less biased results. Herein lies an additional methodological contribution.

Incivility is widespread in the workplace and has been shown to have significant affective and behavioral consequences. However, the authors still have a limited understanding as to whether, how and when discrete incivility events impact team performance. Adopting a resource depletion perspective and focusing on the cognitive implications of such events, the authors introduce a multi-level model linking the adverse effects of such events on team members’ working memory – the “workbench” of the cognitive system where most planning, analyses, and management of goals occur – to team effectiveness. The model which the authors develop proposes that that uncivil interpersonal behavior in general, and rudeness – a central manifestation of incivility – in particular, may place a significant drain on individuals’ working memory capacity, affecting team effectiveness via its effects on individual performance and coordination-related team emergent states and action-phase processes. In the context of this model, the authors offer an overarching framework for making sense of disparate findings regarding how, why and when incivility affects performance outcomes at multiple levels. More specifically, the authors use this framework to: (a) suggest how individual-level cognitive impairment and weakened coordinative team processes may mediate these incivility-based effects, and (b) explain how event, context, and individual difference factors moderators may attenuate or exacerbate these cognition-mediated effects.