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Article Excerpt
The applied literature has many references discussing the recent increase in office rudeness or workplace incivility (e.g. Buhler, 2003; Fritscher-Porter, 2003; Johnson & Indvik, 2001; Zauderer, 2002). Speculated reasons for this rise in workplace incivility include: greater worker diversity leading to more misunderstanding; greater perceived job insecurity as companies have downsized; greater stress on employees, including being overworked; and lower general employee job satisfaction, partially as a function of worker-perceived entitlement (Buhler, 2003; Johnson & Indvik, 2001; Muir, 2000). While research has begun to examine the perceptions and responses of targets of workplace incivility (e.g. Cortina, Magley, Williams, & Langhout, 2001; Cortina & Magley, 2003; Cupach, Huggins, Long, & Metts, 2002; Montgomery, Kane, & Vance, 2004; Pearson, Andersson, & Wegner, 2001; Pearson & Porath, 2001), no scholarly research to date has focused specifically on the factors that might cause instigators to initiate uncivil behaviours. Our paper addresses this dearth of research, and offers the first test of a measure of instigated workplace incivility.
The construct of workplace incivility
As interest in deviant workplace behaviour has grown, a distinct stream of research focused specifically on lesser forms of interpersonal mistreatment in organizations is emerging (Andersson & Pearson, 1999; Cortina & Magley, 2003; Cortina et al., 2001; Keashly, 1998; Miller, 2000; Montgomery et al., 2004; Pearson et al., 2001). Workplace incivility, in particular, is gaining recognition as a unique form of interpersonal mistreatment characterized by ambiguity of intent and violation of workplace norms for mutual respect. As defined by Andersson and Pearson (1999, p. 457) and adopted by Cortina and colleagues (Cortina et al., 2001; Cortina & Magley, 2003), workplace incivility is:
low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target, in violation of workplace norms for mutual respect. Uncivil behaviours are characteristically rude, discourteous, displaying a lack of respect for others.
Specific examples include making condescending or demeaning comments, ignoring someone, giving someone the silent treatment, insulting or yelling at someone, overriding decisions without giving a reason, and addressing someone in unprofessional terms (Cortina et al., 2001; Johnson & Indvik, 2001; Pearson, Andersson, & Porath, 2000)--behaviours that have been neglected in organizational research.
Workplace incivility is thus embedded within the larger construct of workplace deviant behaviour, defined by Robinson and Bennett (1995, p. 556) as 'voluntary behaviour that violates significant organizational norms, and in doing so threatens the well-being of the organization or its members or both'. Robinson and Bennett explain further that one manifestation of workplace deviance is interpersonal deviance, behaviour that directly harms individuals within the organization (Bennett & Robinson, 2000; Robinson & Bennett, 1995). Their qualitative description and examples of interpersonal deviance (see Robinson & Bennett, 1995, pp. 8-12) include behaviours of high intensity and overt intent to harm the target (i.e. violence), behaviours of moderate to high intensity and overt intent to harm the target (i.e. aggression), low-intensity behaviours in which the intent to harm is present but ambiguous to the target or observers (i.e. some forms of incivility that are inherently aggressive), as well as low-intensity behaviours without intent to harm but in which the intent is ambiguous (i.e. other forms of incivility, such as those performed out of ignorance or oversight).
Pearson and her colleagues (Andersson & Pearson, 1999; Pearson et al., 2000, 2001) have examined workplace incivility as a social interaction and explain that an uncivil act instigated towards another at work can result in different dynamics: it can be non-reciprocated, reciprocated and not escalate, or escalate into a back and forth exchange which can result in more deviant behaviour, on rare occasions even culminating in violence. Furthermore, there can be secondary effects in the workplace through modelling, for example, if an uncivil exchange between workers A and B prompts worker C to uncivilly 'attack' worker D. A theoretically rich model of potentially spiralling and possibly escalating incivility encounters between the instigator (worker A) and target (worker B) is offered (Andersson & Pearson, 1999, p. 460) and suggests that the ideal research design would involve tracking interacting employee dyads over time (Andersson & Pearson, 1999; Pearson et al., 2001).
To date, empirical research has not tested such a model. Empirical research on workplace incivility has focused primarily on the target's experience of uncivil behaviours (e.g. Cortina et al., 2001; Cortina & Magley, 2003; Cupach et al., 2002; Pearson et al., 2001; Pearson & Porath, 2001), and not on the tit-for-tat exchange described in the applied literature and theorized by Pearson and colleagues. Accordingly, the only validated measure of workplace incivility is a measure of received or experienced workplace incivility developed by Cortina and colleagues, a 7-item scale that asks respondents how often they have been in a situation where superiors or co-workers performed a series of low intensity behaviours toward them. Sample items include 'paid little attention to your statement or showed little interest in your opinion' and 'made demeaning or derogatory remarks about you'.
The first examination of experienced work incivility using this measure revealed that 71% of a 1,180 public-sector employee sample reported some type of workplace incivility in the previous 5 years (Cortina et al., 2001). Such experienced workplace incivility was positively
associated with greater perceived psychological distress and thoughts of quitting, as well as negatively related to key facets of job satisfaction, that is, work itself, supervisor, co-worker, pay and benefits and promotions. The cross-sectional nature of the study, however, precluded inferring causality; it is possible that higher experienced workplace incivility leads to increased job dissatisfaction and distress, or that higher dissatisfaction and distress leads to increased experienced workplace incivility. Employees who are unhappy at work for some reason may have a lower, more sensitive threshold for perceived mistreatment (Locke, 1976). Clearly, experienced work incivility correlating with negative individual (e.g. withdrawal) and organizational (e.g. less trust in leaders) outcomes is consistent with the findings of Pearson and colleagues (2001, p. 1410, Fig. 2).
Instigated workplace incivility as a distinct construct
Given early findings on experienced incivility and the theorized back and forth nature of the incivility spiral, we propose that instigated incivility is an important and missing concept in the understanding of workplace incivility. At this time, no separate measure for instigated workplace incivility exists. To explore the distinctiveness of instigated workplace incivility, we attempt to disentangle it from the related construct (and measure) of interpersonal deviance.
Bennett and Robinson (2000) developed a broad measure of workplace deviant behaviour, from which two factors emerged, organizational deviance and interpersonal deviance. Within their 7-item interpersonal deviance scale (Bennett & Robinson, 2000, p. 360), two of the items--'acted rudely towards someone at work' (40%) and 'made fun of someone at work' (57%)--seem consistent with the definition of workplace incivility (Andersson & Pearson, 1999) as a 'low-intensity deviant behaviour with ambiguous intent to harm the target'. The participation percentages, that is, percentage of respondents exhibiting the behaviour at least once in the last year, for the Bennett and Robinson (2000, p. 354) instrument validation sample, are shown in italicized parentheses for each item.
The other five items in the Bennett and Robinson (2000) 7-item scale, however, represent more intense forms of interpersonal deviance: 'played a mean prank on someone at work' (7%), 'said something hurtful to someone at work' (38%), 'made an ethnic, religious or racial remark or joke at work' (43%), 'cursed at someone at work' (30%), and 'publicly embarrassed someone at work' (11%). These behaviours are, arguably, of moderate intensity and with an overt intent to harm the target, behaviours usually classified more distinctively as aggression (Neuman & Baron, 1998). In constructing their interpersonal deviance scale, Bennett and Robinson (2000) indeed acknowledge that they 'do not include all possible types of deviant behavior' (2000, p. 358). Their scale neglects to represent the full range of interpersonal deviant behaviours that the authors describe in their previous work (Robinson & Bennett, 1995, 1997), such as physical assault on the high intensity end of the spectrum and minor incivilities on the low-intensity end. Interestingly, behaviours of lower intensity and with ambiguous intent to harm the target such as 'made an obscene comment at work' and 'repeated a rumour or gossip about your boss or co-workers' were included in their investigation, but did not get retained as part of the measure after a principal axis factor analysis (Bennett & Robinson, 2000, p. 353).
Collectively, the preceding arguments lead to our first hypothesis:
Hypothesis I. Instigated workplace incivility is distinct from experienced workplace incivility and interpersonal deviance.
Relationships of correlates to instigated workplace incivility So why would an employee be uncivil to someone at work? If we ground instigated workplace incivility within more general deviant work behaviour literature (Giacalone & Greenberg, 1997), this suggests various correlates to consider, including organizational justice. Prior research suggests three types of organizational justice (Colquitt,...
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