Christine L. Porath

Christine L. Porath
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC

Ph.D. in Managment

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37
Publications
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6,312
Citations

Publications

Publications (37)
Article
Prior research has questioned the utility of empowerment for high power distance employees. Rather than abandon empowerment in these contexts, we test the plausibility of empowering high power distance employees vicariously through observation, normalization and legitimization of empowered behavior. Extending theories of empowerment and social cogn...
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Purpose The purpose of this research is to investigate how organizations can best facilitate an empowered workforce that makes autonomous decisions and acts expediently, which the literature on high performing organizations posits will increase the likelihood of sustained performance and retaining competitive advantages. We introduce a novel mechan...
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Workplace incivility is rampant and on the rise-with costs to individuals and organizations. Despite the increased need for civility, little is known about potential individual benefits of civility, defined as behavior involving politeness and regard for others in the workplace, within workplace norms for respect (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). Recent...
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In this paper, we establish the relationship between de-energizing relationships and individual performance in organizations. To date, the emphasis in social network research has largely been on positive dimensions of relationships despite literature from social psychology revealing the prevalence and detrimental impact of de-energizing relationshi...
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Incivility in the workplace is a costly problem for managers. Incivility has been found to have serious negative implications when it is experienced directly and even when it is simply witnessed. To date, there is no clear explanation for what causes this effect. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and combining theories from management, social ps...
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Reprimands are a way for a salesperson to fulfill managerial responsibilities for quality control. Two experiments investigate the effect of a salesperson's reprimand of an employee on customers' feelings of anger after a service infraction. Study 1, which involved 77 undergraduate students in a between-subjects design, shows that compared to no re...
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Reprimands are a way for a salesperson to fulfill managerial responsibilities for quality control. Two experiments investigate the effect of a salesperson’s reprimand of an employee on customers’ feelings of anger after a service infraction. Study 1, which involved 77 undergraduate students in a between-subjects design, shows that compared to no re...
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Using appraisal theory, this research examined targets' emotional responses to workplace incivility, and how these responses impact targets' behavioral responses. Targets who reported greater incivility reported greater anger, fear, and sadness. Targets' anger was associated with more direct aggression against the instigators; targets' fear was ass...
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Thriving is defined as the psychological state in which individuals experience both a sense of vitality and learning. We developed and validated a measure of the construct of thriving at work. Additionally, we theoretically refined the construct by linking it to key outcomes, such as job performance, and by examining its contextual embeddedness. In...
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What makes for sustainable individual and organizational performance? Employees who are thriving-not just satisfied and productive but also engaged in creating the future. The authors found that people who fit this description demonstrated 16% better overall performance, 125% less burnout, 32% more commitment to the organization, and 46% more job s...
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Despite civility's natural appeal across societies historically, and recent concern over the lack of it, civility has received little attention in the management literature, and there are relatively few empirical studies. In this chapter, I review empirical findings on civility and incivility. I highlight the benefits of civility and the costs of i...
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What do we know about the effects of rudeness? Studies show that even when the target of rudeness does not exact retribution, performance plummets, whether measured using cognitive or creative tasks, or in terms of helpfulness. What's more, witnesses are affected in similar ways. Rudeness even primes dysfunctional behaviour and aggressive thoughts....
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Employees sometimes engage in uncivil behavior in the workplace. We ask (1) How commonly do customers witness an employee behaving uncivilly? (2) What negative effects does customers’ witnessing of an employee’s uncivil behavior have on customers and firms? (3) Why do these effects occur? The results of three studies suggest that it is not uncommon...
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We introduce the incivility construct and demonstrate that witnessing an incident of employee-employee incivility causes consumers to make negative generalizations about (a) others who work for the firm, (b) the firm as a whole, and (c) future encounters with the firm, inferences that go well beyond the incivility incident. We demonstrate the proce...
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In three experimental studies, we found that witnessing rudeness enacted by an authority figure (Studies 1 and 3) and a peer (Study 2) reduced observers’ performance on routine tasks as well as creative tasks. In all three studies we also found that witnessing rudeness decreased citizenship behaviors and increased dysfunctional ideation. Negative a...
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Christine Porath and Christine Pearson Uncivil behavior at work damages productivity far more than most managers would imagine. Reprint F0904J
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We use a laboratory experiment to study how to prevent corporate fraud. Our experiment is the first to replicate the salient features of corporate fraud in a controlled setting. We find that requiring additional disclosures significantly reduces fraud. This finding runs counter to implications from previous research, but that research does not incl...
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Previous research on organizational practices is replete with contradictory evidence regarding their effects. Here, the authors argue that these contradictory findings may have occurred because researchers have often examined complex practice combinations and have failed to investigate a broad variety of firm-level outcomes. Thus, past research may...
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In three experimental studies, we provided an empirical test of how rudeness affects task performance and helpfulness. Different forms of rudeness--rudeness instigated by a direct authority figure, rudeness delivered by a third party, and imagined rudeness--converged to produce the same effects. Results from these studies showed that rudeness reduc...
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How do people respond to status challenges? We suggest that responses depend on the relative status and genders of challenger and target; in particular, these variables affect appraisals about the status challenge (operationally defined as an act of incivility) and likely outcomes of various responses, and those appraisals proximately determine res...
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The authors investigated the effects on job performance of 3 forms of goal orientation and 4 self-regulation (SR) tactics. In a longitudinal field study with salespeople, learning and performance-prove goal orientation predicted subsequent sales performance, whereas performance-avoid goal orientation negatively predicted sales performance. The SR t...
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Incivility. or employees' lack of regard for one another, is costly to organizations in subtle and pervasive ways. Although uncivil behaviors occur commonly, many organizations fail to recognize them, few understand their harmful effects, and most managers and executives are ill-equipped to deal with them. Over the past eight years, as we have...
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In this chapter, Christine Pearson, Lynne Andersson, and Christine Porath investigate workplace incivility. Of the harmful workplace behaviors covered in this book, incivility appears to be the most low-key, chronic, and ubiquitous form. The actor's intentions, indeed awareness, are not necessarily a factor in the effects of incivility on the targe...
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Full-text available
In this article, the authors attempt to provide insight for understanding, recognizing, and managing workplace incivility. They base this work on interviews and workshops across the US conducted with more than 700 workers, managers, and professionals in a wide range of profit, nonprofit, and government sectors and questionnaire responses from an ad...
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The article presents a study on four approaches to the employment relationship in an effort to learn how different relationships affect employee attitudes and performance. The first approach offers short-term financial incentives in exchange for specific tasks accomplished by the employee. The second approach requires both the employee and employer...
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While managers are looking everywhere to cut costs and maximize productivity, chances are they are missing a potentially devastating expense: the cost of incivility. As employees exchange seemingly inconsequential inconsiderate words and deeds, productivity plummets and norms are shredded. If employees are behaving badly toward one another, it mean...
Article
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-123). Microfiche. s

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