To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. - Arthur Schopenhauer
What I-O Folks Are Reading
Selections from published articles, articles in press, and other academic sources.
Chronic vs. Acute Incivility
Most research on incivility treats it as a chronic condition.
From this perspective, it is the frequency of encounters with incivility over a significant period of time that matters, and a single, isolated exposure to incivility does not merit much concern. To the contrary, isolated encounters with incivility can result in serious, negative consequences for individuals and organizations.
A Review of the Short-Term Implications of Discrete, Episodic Incivility. Social and Personality Psychology Compass.
It Doesn’t Affect Everyone the Same Way
Our model emphasizes how employees' attributions about incivility are influenced by the combination of the perceived power of the source of the incivility, employees' individual resources, and the cultural value of collectivism of the country in which the employees were raised, and how their attributions may lead to a freeze response, resulting in a downward spiral that impacts their health and wellbeing.
Kick Me While I’m Down: Modeling Employee Differences of the Impact of Workplace Incivility on Employees' Health and Wellbeing. Human Resource Management Review.
And Just Watching This Stuff Sucks
…the authors found evidence that witnessing incivility toward women indirectly increased turnover intentions six weeks later, first through elevated negative affect and then through increased cognitive burnout.
Does Workplace Incivility Spur Deviant Behaviors: Roles of Interpersonal Conflict and Organizational Climate. Personnel Review.
What Everyone Else is Reading
Articles, books, and resources from the popular business press.
Incivility on the Rise?
Failing to acknowledge a favor or a courtesy is a triple mistake, and it’s becoming more common.
Is it, though?
No Thank You. Seth’s Blog.
And Spreading?
When you experience rudeness, you may be primed to look for it—and perceive it more frequently around you—and also be more likely to dole it out yourself.
Your Boss’s Rude Behavior is Spreading Like Wildfire. Fast Company.
Some Topics Are Tougher Than Others
Disagreements over personal tastes are usually warm and good-natured. When friends mock us for our love of trashy TV shows, those disagreements can strengthen rather than weaken the relationship. Disagreeing over facts is also relatively comfortable, provided it really is a debate about facts…the most intense conversations are those in which one or both sides feel that their equal humanity has been put into question.
How to Productively Disagree on Tough Topics. MIT Sloan Management Review.
Construct of the Week
A psychological construct relevant to work psychology.
Workplace Incivility (WPI): Being rude or disrespectful at work in small ways that don't always seem mean on purpose. This can include things like making someone feel small, insulting them, or breaking workplace rules in a way that harms someone else.
The Research Quiz
Do men and women judge workplace gossipers differently? Researchers conducted an experiment in which men and women were exposed to negative workplace gossip and were then asked to rate the morality of the gossiper.
Who judged the gossiper more harshly?
Now This! The first rule of SIOP is to talk about SIOP. If you’re going to talk about SIOP on social media, use the hashtag #siop24. Otherwise, we're going to get mixed up with another group.
In 2009, I transferred from a Talent Management role San Diego, CA to an HR Generalist at a Manufacturing plant just outside of Buffalo, New York. At that time, we were in the middle of a lot of change - Switched 401k providers with reduced investment options, moved from traditional to a high-deductible health plan, and went to a smoking-free environment. All these changes happened within the first couple of months that I arrived. People were working a lot of mandatory overtime at this time too. People were on edge and I saw an increase in the types of incivility behaviors outlined in this post: showing up late to meetings, eye-rolling, crossed-arms, gossiping behind others back, escalating to more serious behaviors, taking off and throwing one's safety glasses at the floor in the direction of their supervisor, etc.
I began thinking about and research things I could do to help ease tension and get everyone back closer to normal. I attended SIOP the following April and attended a session on C.R.E.W. (civility, respect, and engagement at work). It was a good talk, and I walked away with a better understanding of the concept and an idea that I could take back to work and try.
Because we were a manufacturing site, training employees on HR stuff was difficult. We would shut production down 3X a year for preventative maintenance and run an 18 hour Training Day (3 shifts, 8 hours each). I designed, developed, and delivered a training session I titled, Positive Work Behavior, a title Steve Ashworth first coined when he and I were working to implement personality assessment back in the early 2000s ('personality' scared executives back then - i.e., Target).
The training session was simple - I talked about the concept of C.R.E.W. and I shared list of behaviors from 'not so bad' to 'pretty scary'. I had the big Post-it Sticky easel sheets up on the walls on the side of the auditorium (our biggest session was about 100 people). I asked employees to first get up and put a dot next to one of more behaviors they were guilty of during the past 90 days. A little later, I asked the audience to put a different colored dot next to the behaviors they saw others guilty of during the same time period. A lot more dots. Seeing this visually had an effect and seemed to lighten the mood a bit in the room.
We ended the session with everyone taking out their safety card (they carried this with them and whenever a manager saw them doing something safe, they would punch it) and I had them write the worse bad behavior they were guilty of on the back of the card as a reminder. I also asked them to write the same behavior on a sticky note and put into a ballot box before leaving the room.
I tallied the dots I collected from the Post-It Boards and the ballot boxes to establish a baseline. My plan was to do a follow-up in 6 months. I never got the chance to collect Time 2 data, I had left the company slightly before the next training day. However, I got a lot of good feedback from that session, it was one of the more memorable Training days employees said they had. It felt like things were getting better/returning back to normal, but without data, it could've just been wishful thinking.