Mirella and Rick, with their rude behaviour, eye rolling and public humiliation, are no different than New York’s fare invaders and public drinkers. Their conduct breaks down basic norms of civility and courtesy.
These behaviours have been coined `workplace incivility’ and have in the past decade been the subject of intriguing research. Researches Christine Pearson and Christine Porath polled several thousand managers and employees from a diverse range of U.S. and Canadian companies about their responses to rudeness at work. They found that these behaviours have significant effects on individuals, teams and organizations. They report that “targets of bad behaviour get angry, frustrated, even vengeful. Job satisfaction falls, performance plummets and some employees leave”. Of those who stay,
- 48% of people affected by incivility decreased their work effort,
- 47% decreased their time at work, and 38% decreased their work quality,
- 66% said their performance declined,
- 63% lost time avoiding the offender, while 80% lost work time worrying about the incident,
- And – get this! – 78% said their commitment to the organization declined!
None of this, of course, is good news for the organization. And yet, incivility is alive and well in every workplace. In the course of my work with a wide cross-section of organizations I’ve conducted my own informal polling, which confirms that incivility is rampant; there is not one workplace where people are not intimately familiar with its manifestations and effects.
The fact that the Mirellas and Ricks of our world may not necessarily be doing this intentionally, or the fact that it is their `personality’ that causes them to behave in these ways, does not make it less of a threat to the organizational fabric.
And it certainly doesn’t make it easier for those folks who have to work alongside these people day in and day out and are at a loss as to how to handle their behaviour!
So what can be done? Stay tuned….
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