Have you ever been excluded from professional camaraderie or opportunities? Did you ever witness colleagues having their judgment unfairly questioned over a matter they were responsible for?
Incivility refers to rude, condescending, and ostracizing acts that violate workplace norms of respect (Cortina et al., 2017). Unfortunately, because these are often subtle slights or exclusions, they are often brushed under the rug as unimportant. However, research finds that incivility is harmful, but it can also infect large swaths of an organization via emotional contagion (Foulk et al., 2016).
Uncivil behaviors are perceived by employees as moderately to very frustrating, annoying, offensive, and bothersome (Cortina & Magley, 2009), creating emotional responses such as anger, sadness, and fear (Porath & Pearson, 2012). Incivility makes employees more vulnerable, cynical, and exhausted, increasing thoughts about finding a new job (Kabat-Farr et al., 2018). Targets of incivility also are less helpful to each other and less creative (Porath & Erez, 2007).
To date, scientists and practitioners have mainly proposed and used civility training to control incivility's contagion. However, very few interventions have been developed. Even fewer have been put to the empirical test, with exceptions for the Civility, Respect, and Engagement in the Workplace (Osatuke et al., 2009) and the Civility Among Healthcare Professionals (Walsh & Magley, 2013).
The CREW is grounded in well-established organizational development principles such as participation, responsiveness, and empowerment. This intervention involved six months of weekly or biweekly meetings of 10 to 15 employees, intending to build respectful and trusting relationships among the group and foster positive emotional contagion.
The CAHP presents a similar but much shorter frame of intervention of train-the-trainer 2 hours workshops addressing themes related to community, engagement, and empowerment to foster immediate changes in knowledge and attitudes about civility, enhancing the quality of the social environment.
While studies conducting the CREW seem to reduce workplace incivility and improve employees' relationships significantly, other studies conducting the CAHP demonstrated divergent results depending on the context. Moreover, important limitations reduce the large-scale adoption of these interventions. First, this approach is not recommended for problematic work groups since discussions about themes related to civility require a minimum level of trust and goodwill between participants, which is unlikely to happen when they are engaged in active conflicts (Osatuke et al., 2012). Furthermore, civility interventions are multi-component and complex, and today's organizations cannot afford the time and resources required for such interventions.
Outside the focus on civility: leadership (e.g., Kabat-Farr et al., 2019), norms for civility (e.g., Walsh et al., 2011), development of interpersonal competencies (e.g., Communication; Howard & Embree, 2020), writing Intervention (Kirk et al., 2011), and cognitive rehearsal techniques (e.g., Griffin, 2004) are presented as possible Interventions to help combat workplace incivility.
References
Cortina, L. M., Kabat-Farr, D., Magley, V. J., & Nelson, K. (2017). Researching rudeness: The past, present, and future of the science of incivility. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), 299-313.
Cortina, L. M., & Magley, V. J. (2009). Patterns and profiles of response to incivility in the workplace. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 14(3), 272-288.
Foulk, T., Woolum, A., & Erez, A. (2016). Catching rudeness is like catching a cold: The contagion effects of low-intensity negative behaviors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(1), 50-67.
Howard, M. S., & Embree, J. L. (2020). Educational intervention improves communication abilities of nurses encountering workplace incivility. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 51(3), 138-144.
Kabat-Farr, D., Cortina, L. M., & Marchiondo, L. A. (2018). The emotional aftermath of incivility: Anger, guilt, and the role of organizational commitment. International Journal of Stress Management, 25(2), 109-128.
Kabat-Farr, D., Walsh, B. M., & McGonagle, A. K. (2019). Uncivil supervisors and perceived work ability: The joint moderating roles of job involvement and grit. Journal of Business Ethics, 156(4), 971-985.
Kirk, B. A., Schutte, N. S., & Hine, D. W. (2011). The effect of an expressive‐writing intervention for employees on emotional self‐efficacy, emotional intelligence, affect, and workplace incivility. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41(1), 179-195.
Osatuke, K., Leiter, M., Belton, L., Dyrenforth, S., & Ramsel, D. (2012). Civility, Respect, and Engagement at the Workplace (CREW): A national organization development program at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Journal of Management Policies and Practices, 1(2), 25-34.
Osatuke, K., Moore, S. C., Ward, C., Dyrenforth, S. R., & Belton, L. (2009). Civility, respect, engagement in the workforce (CREW) nationwide organization development intervention at Veterans Health Administration. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 45(3), 384-410.
Porath, C. L., & Erez, A. (2007). Does rudeness really matter? The effects of rudeness on task performance and helpfulness. Academy of Management Journal, 50(5), 1181-1197.
Porath, C. L., & Pearson, C. M. (2010). The cost of bad behavior. Organizational Dynamics, 39(1), 64–71.
Porath, C. L., & Pearson, C. M. (2012). Emotional and behavioral responses to workplace incivility and the impact of hierarchical status. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42, E326-E357.
Walsh, B. M., & Magley, V. J. (2013, May). Testing a model of civility training effectiveness. Paper presented at the symposium Work, Stress and Health, Los Angeles, CA.
Walsh, B. M., Magley, V. J., Reeves, D. W., Davies-Schrils, K. A., Marmet, M. D., & Gallus, J. A. (2011). Assessing Workgroup Norms for Civility: The Development of the Civility Norms Questionnaire-Brief. Journal of Business and Psychology, 27(4), 407–420.
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