ArticlePDF Available

Workplace incivility: A review of the literature and agenda for future research

October 2016
Journal of Organizational Behavior 37(4)

DOI:10.1002/job.1976

Authors:

Pauline Schilpzand

Oregon State University

Irene E. De Pater

Edith Cowan University

Amir Erez

University of Florda

A growing body of research explores workplace incivility, defined as low-intensity deviant workplace behavior with an ambiguous intent to harm. In the 15 years since the theoretical introduction of the workplace incivility construct, research in this domain has taken off, albeit in a variety of directions. We review the extant body of research on workplace incivility and note the multitude of samples, sources, methodologies, and instrumentation used. In this review article, we provide an organized review of the extant body of work that encompasses three distinct types of incivility: experienced, witnessed, and instigated incivility. These three types of incivility serve as the foundation for a series of comprehensive models in which we integrate extant empirical research. In the last part of this review article, we suggest directions for future research that may contribute to this growing body of work. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

. Experienced incivility-antecedents and outcomes

…

. Witnessed incivility-outcomes

…

Outcomes of witnessed incivility

…

. Instigated incivility-antecedents and outcomes

…

Figures - uploaded by Irene E. De Pater

Content may be subject to copyright.

Content uploaded by Irene E. De Pater

Content may be subject to copyright.

Workplace incivility: A review of the literature and

agenda for future research

PAULINE SCHILPZAND

*, IRENE E. DE PATER

AND AMIR EREZ

Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, U.S.A.

National University of Singapore, Singapore

University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, U.S.A.

Summary A growing body of research explores workplace incivility, deﬁned as low-intensity deviant workplace behav-

ior with an ambiguous intent to harm. In the 15 years since the theoretical introduction of the workplace in-

civility construct, research in this domain has taken off, albeit in a variety of directions. We review the extant

body of research on workplace incivility and note the multitude of samples, sources, methodologies, and in-

strumentation used. In this review article, we provide an organized review of the extant body of work that

encompasses three distinct types of incivility: experienced, witnessed, and instigated incivility. These three

types of incivility serve as the foundation for a series of comprehensive models in which we integrate extant

empirical research. In the last part of this review article, we suggest directions for future research that may

Keywords: incivility; review; workplace deviance

Don’t discount the power of your words. The thought that they might cause unnecessary hurt or discomfort should inform

every conversation. P.M. Forni

In the last two decades, workplace negativity has emerged as a focal topic in the organization behavior literature.

Thousands of studies have investigated how various types of negative workplace behaviors inﬂuence organization-

level, group-level, and individual-level outcomes. Originally, the literature mainly focused on topics such as work-

place aggression, deviance, bullying, and abusive supervision and predominately investigated the detrimental effects

of negative workplace behaviors on targets’work attitudes, work behaviors, and well-being. This research has shown

that targets of these negative workplace behaviors engage less in organizational citizenship behaviors (Dalal, 2005),

have higher turnover intentions (Chiaburu & Harrison, 2008), and experience more stress than their colleagues

(Bowling & Beehr, 2006). A relatively new addition to the domain of negative workplace behavior is workplace

incivility, deﬁned as low-intensity deviant workplace behavior with an ambiguous intent to harm (Andersson & Pearson,

1999, p. 457). Examples of uncivil behavior include talking down to others, making demeaning remarks, and not listening

to somebody (Porath & Pearson, 2009).

Important deﬁnitional elements of workplace incivility that help to differentiate it from other negative interper-

sonal workplace behavioral constructs are its low intensity (aggression, violence, and bullying are more severe)

and its ambiguous (rather than overt or clearly diagnosable) intent to harm. The seemingly related constructs of

aggression, bullying, and abusive supervision are more overt, and therefore, targets of these behaviors more easily

interpret them as purposely intended. The intentionality of incivility is more difﬁcult to discern. A third characteristic

that helps to differentiate incivility from negative leadership constructs such as abusive supervision is the speciﬁc

source of the negative conduct. Incivility may be enacted not only by individuals in managerial jobs or supervisory

roles but also by coworkers or customers. These distinctions are important, not only because incivility carves out a

speciﬁc space in the domain of negative workplace behavior, but primarily because these characteristics likely cause

*Correspondence to: Pauline Schilpzand, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, U.S.A. E-mail: pauline.schilpzand@bus.oregonstate.edu

Received 24 October 2013

Revised 23 September 2014, Accepted 24 September 2014

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 37, S57–S88 (2016)

Published online 28 October 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.1976

The IRIOP Annual Review Issue

different cognitions, emotions, and behaviors in the targets of incivility when compared with recipients of other

negative workplace conduct. Moreover, it is also likely that the antecedents of incivility differ from those that incite

more severe and/or intentional negative workplace behaviors.

Workplace incivility is ubiquitous. It has been estimated that 98 percent of workers experience incivility, with 50

percent experiencing such conduct at least weekly (Porath & Pearson, 2013). The monetary cost of experiencing

incivility is estimated at $14,000 per employee annually, due to project delays and cognitive distraction from work

(Pearson & Porath, 2009). These statistics are alarming as they indicate that incivility affects many employees and

has a large ﬁnancial impact on the organizations they work for. Moreover, the human costs borne by employees who

are subjected to workplace incivility are quite severe. They may, for instance worry, try to avoid the instigator,

withdraw from work, and even take their frustrations out on customers (Porath & Pearson, 2013).

The alarming rate and costs of workplace incivility stimulated universities to develop and execute civility

campaigns (e.g., Oregon State University, Central Florida University, State University of New York, and Loyola

University), led to the startup of a grassroots movement that advocates civility in government, and motivated a

variety of organizations to emphasize civility in their organizations (e.g., Character Counts in Iowa, the Community

Foundation of Greater Des Moines, and the Interfaith Alliance of Iowa). In fact, the public domain recognized the

importance of civility as early as 1922 when the Fifth Avenue Bus Company in New York City requested (inspirational)

essays about public civility for an award of up to $150. However, even though the importance of civility has been

acknowledged a long time ago, workplace incivility currently is a pervasive and costly behavior that only quite

recently has become the topic of empirical research.

So far, research on the antecedents and broad consequences of workplace incivility as a whole has not been inte-

grated in a narrative review. One study that integrated some of the work on workplace incivility is Hershcovis’s

(2011) paper that examines how various forms of workplace misbehavior relate to target outcomes. Our narrative

review is quite different from Hershcovis’s work. She analyzed studies on experienced workplace incivility that used

the Workplace Incivility Scale (WIS; Cortina, Magley, Williams, & Langhout, 2001) and included job satisfaction,

turnover intent, and/or well-being as dependent variables. While the integrative model that Hershcovis (2011) pro-

poses is very helpful in synthesizing a broad extant body of work on the effects of various forms of experienced

workplace misbehavior, our narrative review aims to review all empirical research on workplace incivility that

has been conducted beginning in 1999 and including work through the year 2013. It includes all types of workplace

incivility workers may encounter, incorporates studies utilizing a broad range of methodologies and measurement

instruments, and employs a wide variety of antecedents, processes, and outcomes of workplace incivility.

We believe there is a strong need for an integrated review on workplace incivility at this moment in time, because

a substantive number of studies on workplace incivility have been conducted. Despite the progress that has been

made, the literature is moving forward without a strong theoretical foundation that guides this progress. Without

a strong theoretical direction, the work on incivility has not progressed cohesively. Instead, the materialized work

on incivility is quite fragmented. The broad and diverse extant body of work on incivility makes it difﬁcult for

scholars and practitioners alike to integrate and understand the ﬁndings on this negative workplace behavior. With-

out a clear understanding of the extant work, some potential incivility scholars may be dissuaded to conduct research

in this confusing domain, and practitioners may not be able to incorporate the accumulated knowledge in their or-

ganizational practices. One way to make a body of literature more accessible and clear is to conduct a quantitative

or meta-analytic review. However, as this narrative review will show, at present, the literature on workplace incivil-

ity is not cohesive enough to group the various studies together and test for overall effects. Hence, a meta-analytic

review would not provide sufﬁcient and ﬁne-grained insight into this broad literature. Another way to advance the

accessibility and clarity of a growing body of research is to provide a qualitative review of the literature. We believe

that the literature on workplace incivility would beneﬁt greatly from a narrative review that organizes, summarizes,

and analyzes the studies that have been published in the past 15 years.

In this qualitative review of the literature on workplace incivility, we provide an organized overview of the three

distinct, but interrelated areas of workplace incivility research, namely, experienced incivility,witnessed incivility,

and instigated incivility. Research on experienced incivility investigates the feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and other

S58 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

correlates of employees who are the target of uncivil workplace behavior. Research on witnessed incivility considers

these relationships for witnesses of workplace incivility, and research on instigated incivility investigates instigators

of workplace incivility directed toward employees and assesses its antecedents and outcomes. In this review article,

we assemble the studies that have been conducted in these distinct areas of research in order to provide a sorely

needed oversight of the literature on workplace incivility that may spur further research on workplace incivility

and provide insights to practitioners.

Background

In 1999, Andersson and Pearson introduced workplace incivility as a new domain within the research on negative

workplace behaviors in an inﬂuential theoretical article in the Academy of Management Review. They posited that

uncivil workplace behaviors within ongoing coworker interactions would be reciprocated with more severe forms

of negativity. As a basic tenet of their model, Andersson and Pearson proposed that incivility is instigative by nature

as it incites reciprocity and negative overcompensation, which ultimately results in a spiral of increasing negativity

in workplace behaviors. In the past 15 years, many empirical studies have used the theoretical foundation of this new

construct of incivility but diverged from its theoretical underpinnings in signiﬁcant ways. First, researchers hardly

examined the veracity of the proposed spiral of negativity, and so far, there is no empirical evidence that supports

the escalating spiraling effect of incivility. Second, while the original theory conceptualized the spiral of incivility

as unfolding over time within existing coworker dyads, some incivility research has been conducted using episodic

or one-time interactions between individuals, decoupled from the theoretical propositions of the ongoing reciprocity

and escalation of negativity. Third, the original conceptualization of incivility posited incivility within existing

coworker ties and its effects to take place between coworker dyads. However, some incivility research has moved

beyond the coworker boundaries and investigated the correlates of customer incivility. Moreover, a sizable body

of research has also noted that the harmful effects extend beyond the dyad, namely to third-party observers. These

notable diversions from the original theory suggest that this research domain may beneﬁt from a new theoretical

framework to facilitate research in these novel directions. To help guide future theoretical development and

empirical study on this topic, a comprehensive and detailed review of the literature may prove helpful to scholars

(Rousseau, Manning, & Denyer, 2008). Given the costs organizations bear as a result of workplace incivility,

practitioners may also beneﬁt from this review, as it will provide a better understanding of this behavior and its

correlates, in terms of antecedents leading up to incivility and consequences of uncivil workplace behavior.

Review of the Empirical Literature

Our review aims to provide readers with a thorough overview of the state of incivility research and is structured into

two parts. In the ﬁrst part of the manuscript, we present the state of the workplace incivility literature by reviewing

the studies published from 1999 through 2013, noting the achieved breadth of the literature in countries, samples,

measurement, sources, topics, and time spans, along with some noted trends in the literature. This part of the review

analyzes the body of work as a whole to provide current and potential incivility scholars more clarity on the literature

as a whole. In the second part of the manuscript, we delineate the accumulated body of research from the inception

of the incivility construct in 1999 to the present and describe the research ﬁndings that have been published during

these 15 years. This part of the review details the ﬁndings of each of the extant papers on workplace incivility

published in journals in the ﬁeld of organizational behavior. We organize this part of the review around the three

types of incivility discussed in the literature (experienced incivility, witnessed incivility, and instigated incivility)

and integrate the accumulated work in these three distinct areas of study. Thus, while the ﬁrst part of the manuscript

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S59

DOI: 10.1002/job

seeks to provide a global and holistic perspective on the workplace incivility literature, in the second part of the

paper, we provide more speciﬁc insights into the extant research on the three types of workplace incivility. We

conclude this review by identifying ways in which we see that this body of knowledge could be further developed.

To identify the relevant literature to include in our narrative review, we conducted searches, using the EBSCO

database with the keywords “incivility”or “rudeness,”of articles published in academic journals in the ﬁeld of work

and organizational psychology. These searches yielded 94 empirical papers, published between 2001 and 2014. The

journals in which these empirical incivility or rudeness papers have been published include the Academy of Management

Journal,Basic and Applied Social Psychology,European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology,Group

and Organization Management,Human Performance,Human Resources Development Quarterly,Information and

Management,International Journal of Conﬂict Management,Journal of Applied Psychology,Journal of Applied

Social Psychology,Journal of Business Ethics,Journal of Business and Psychology,Journal of Nursing Manage-

ment,Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology,Jour-

nal of Organizational Behavior,Journal of Management,Journal of Vocational Behavior,Law & Social Inquiry,

Nursing Research,Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,Organization Science, and Work and

Stress. We excluded 14 papers that did not present primary data, 24 papers that did not measure incivility or rudeness

(or confounded the measurement with another construct), and one paper that used a non-adult sample. We included

the remaining 55 papers in this narrative review.

A Decade and a Half of Progress

The past 15 years shows the “take-off”trend of the new construct of workplace incivility. We can safely say that the

literature has gained momentum. It comprises a diverse body of work that represents a substantive group of authors

and reports effects of workplace incivility for samples from a wide diversity of countries, industries, and professions.

The body of work has now arrived at a point where it can be reviewed as a whole, and various studies can be inte-

grated to advance further research on this impactful organizational behavior. The integrated models synthesize the

empirical gains of this wide body of literature and will help to provide new paths forward for scholars to help expand

this important literature.

Growing body of work

To gain an understanding of the development of this literature, we tabulated the number of empirical studies on

workplace incivility published in journals in the ﬁeld of organizational behavior in Figure 1. Of note is that the ﬁrst

empirical study on workplace incivility was published 2 years after the introduction of the construct in 1999. A few

more empirical articles on workplace incivility were published in 2004 and 2005, and from 2007 onwards, organi-

zational journals published empirical articles on workplace incivility each year, with a fairly steep growth trend. The

year 2012 especially showed a large number of published papers.

Countries and samples

Although the majority of research on workplace incivility employs samples from the United States, the incivility

literature now includes non-US samples from Australia (Grifﬁn, 2010; Martin & Hine, 2005; Kirk, Schutte & Hine,

2011), Canada (Leiter, Laschinger, Day, & Oore, 2011; Leiter, Price, & Spence Laschinger, 2010; Oore et al., 2010;

Spence Laschinger, Leiter, Day, & Gilin, 2009; Spence Laschinger, Leiter, Day, Gilin-Oore, & Mackinnon, 2012;

Van Jaarsveld, Walker & Skarlicki, 2010), China (Chen, Ferris, Kwan, Yan, Zhou, & Hong, 2013; Wu, Zhang, Chiu &

S60 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

He, 2013), Korea (Kim & Shapiro, 2008), New Zealand (Grifﬁn, 2010), the Philippines (Scott, Restubog, &

Zagenczyk, 2013), Singapore (Lim & Lee, 2011; Lim & Teo, 2009), and the UK (Totterdell, Hershcovis & Niven,

2012). These studies show that workplace incivility is not restricted to one geographic area but is a phenomenon that

occurs worldwide and has negative consequences across the world. This implication is noteworthy, as national culture

differences are likely to inﬂuence how “phenomena are socially constructed”(Rousseau et al., 2008) and how indi-

viduals perceive and respond to workplace incivility. For instance, it is possible that employees working in countries

with a cultural high level of power distance are less likely to consider being ignored by their supervisor to be an act of

uncivil conduct than employees working in countries with a cultural lower level of power distance. Yet, the extant

incivility literature shows that notwithstanding speciﬁc differences of what is considered uncivil behavior, the nega-

tive effects of incivility are not conﬁned to certain cultures with speciﬁc characteristics but, instead, universally affect

employees around the globe. Of course, more research from various countries is needed. In an era of globalization, it

is important to broaden the geographies of research on incivility so that it has global relevance and provides insight

into how employees from diverse regions perceive and react to uncivil workplace behaviors (Kim & Shapiro, 2008).

The published work on workplace incivility represents employees from a wide variety of jobs and professions,

including federal court employees (Cortina et al., 2002; Miner-Rubino & Cortina, 2004), property management

company employees (Miner, Settles, & Pratt-Hyatt, 2012), bank tellers (Sliter, Jex, Wolford, & McInnerney,

2010; Sliter, Sliter, & Jex, 2012), manufacturing employees (Wu, Zhang, Chiu & He, 2013), healthcare workers

(Leiter et al., 2011; Leiter et al., 2010; Oore et al., 2010; Spence Laschinger et al., 2009; Spence Laschinger

et al., 2012; Trudel & Reio, 2011), university employees (Cortina & Magley, 2009; Sakurai & Jex, 2012), call center

employees (Scott, Restubog, & Zagenczyk, 2013), grocery store chain employees (Walsh, Magley, Reeves, Davies-

Schrils, Marmet & Gallus, 2012), retail employees (Kern & Grandey, 2009), members of the US Military, city

government and law enforcement agency employees (Cortina, Magley, Williams, & Langhout, 2001), attorneys

(Cortina & Magley, 2009), engineering ﬁrm employees (Adams & Webster, 2013), ﬁnancial services employees

(Lim & Teo, 2009), customer service employees (Diefendorff & Croyle, 2008), and pharmaceutical plant

employees (Blau, 2007). Thus, the extant incivility research also represents a wide array of participants from many

different industries and professions. The generalizability, or external validity, of workplace incivility ﬁndings is

important, as not only national culture but also industry and organization cultures are likely to affect perceptions

Figure 1. Published empirical workplace incivility and rudeness papers

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S61

DOI: 10.1002/job

of and reactions toward incivility. For example, being yelled at in a masculine organizational culture such as the

special operations division in the US Army might be considered quite normative, whereas being yelled at in more

feminine organization cultures such as organizations focused on providing early childhood education or pediatric

health care would probably be considered highly uncivil. Yet, so far, researchers consistently found that even in

cultures where individuals are supposed to be inoculated against rudeness because of the frequency with which they

experience such behaviors (i.e., customer service representatives), small incidents of incivility still affect them

(Rafaeli et al., 2012).

Measures

The development of instruments to measure incivility (e.g., Blau & Andersson, 2005; Cortina et al., 2001; Martin &

Hine, 2005) facilitated empirical research on workplace incivility, and studies using these instruments have revealed

various antecedents, processes, and outcomes of uncivil workplace behavior. The majority of research on incivility

has used the WIS (Cortina et al., 2001), a seven-item scale that asks participants to indicate the frequency with which

they encountered uncivil behavior from supervisors or coworkers during the past 5 years (e.g., Cortina & Magley,

2009; Lim, Cortina & Magley, 2008). Participants are asked how often superiors or coworkers put them down, were

demeaning to them, and excluded or ignored them. Recently, the WIS has been signiﬁcantly updated and now

comprises 12 items that inquire about experiences such as being interrupted, being targeted with angry

outbursts, or receiving hostile looks from coworkers or supervisors over the past year (Cortina, Kabat-Farr,

Leskinen, Huerta, & Magley, 2013). Martin and Hine (2005) developed and validated the Uncivil Workplace

Behavior Questionnaire, a 20-item scale that asks participants to report how frequently they experienced behaviors

(from an unspeciﬁed source) such as raised voices, eye-rolling, being interrupted, being excluded, and being

gossiped about at work during the past year. Kirk et al. (2011) used this scale to measure workplace incivility

in their work. Other researchers (e.g., Sliter, Sliter & Jex, 2012) have used incivility items from the Interpersonal

Conﬂict at Work scale (Spector & Jex, 1998). Moreover, Porath and Pearson (2012) developed and used a

measure based on the deﬁnition and description of incivility (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). This measure assesses

perceived incivility and asks participants to indicate the extent to which instigators of uncivil conduct were rude,

disrespectful, insensitive, and insulting to them. Finally, Penney and Spector (2005) constructed and used an

incivility measure by combining 43 incivility items from three different instruments: the WIS (Cortina et al.,

2001), the Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terror (Leymann, 1990), and the Workplace Aggression

Research Questionnaire (Neuman & Keashly, 2002).

Even though most researchers have used the WIS (Cortina et al., 2001), some have used reduced or adapted

versions (e.g., Blau & Andersson, 2005; Grifﬁn, 2010; Lim & Lee, 2005; Oore et al., 2010). For example,

Miner-Rubino and Reed (2010) adapted the WIS to apply to the workgroup context, and Grifﬁn (2010) aggregated

the scale to be indicative of the organization level of workplace incivility. Blau and Andersson (2005) adapted the

WIS to measure instigated incivility rather than experienced incivility by “ﬂipping”some of the items. Others used

abbreviated versions of this “ﬂipped”version of the WIS (e.g., Leiter et al., 2010). Miner-Rubino and Cortina (2004)

adapted the WIS to measure incivility toward women speciﬁcally, and Meier and Spector (2013) abbreviated the

WIS to study incivility longitudinally. Thus, even integrating and making sense of research that only utilized the

WISmaybedifﬁcult, as this instrument is so divergently used.

Research in the broad incivility domain has inspired authors to develop domain-speciﬁc workplace incivility mea-

sures. For example, Walsh et al. (2012) developed the Norms for Civility scale to measure civility in workgroups,

and Wilson and Holmvall (2013) developed the Incivility from Customers scale to speciﬁcally capture the effects

of customer-instigated incivility. Some scholars have also used Burnﬁeld, Clark, Devendorf, and Jex’s (2004) still

unpublished Customer Incivility Scale (e.g., Sliter et al, 2010). Lim and Teo (2009) developed the Cyber Incivility

Scale to speciﬁcally study uncivil behavior in online communication, and Miner et al. (2012) adapted Harrell’s

(1994) Daily Racist Hassles scale into a Gendered Incivility scale.

S62 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

Other incivility scholars have, rather than asking participants to respond to survey questions about workplace in-

civility, chosen experimental designs to test their hypotheses. These authors expose participants to rude or uncivil

behaviors of a confederate and test participants’reactions after experiencing or witnessing an uncivil encounter with

the confederate (e.g., Porath & Erez, 2007, 2009).

Yet other scholars asked participants to remember or imagine real or ﬁctional uncivil encounters to elicit and test

effects of workplace incivility. For example, Diefendorff and Croyle (2008) asked customer service employees to

imagine a routine customer interaction and to then imagine that the customer behaved uncivilly. Similarly, Porath

and Pearson (2012) asked participants to think about an uncivil workplace interaction they had experienced in the

past. Porath et al. (2008) and Kim and Shapiro (2008) asked study participants to read a scenario that included an

uncivil interaction condition, and Montgomery, Kane, and Vance (2004) presented participants with video segments

that showed uncivil conduct. Some researchers studied the effects of incivility at various points in time. For exam-

ple, Totterdell et al. (2012) employed a diary methodology to study the effects of workplace incivility over time, and

Meier and Spector (2013) studied incivility longitudinally over a ﬁve-wave 8-month time frame. Cortina et al.

(2002) chose a qualitative interview methodology to begin to understand the content of the experience of workplace

incivility and targets’reactions to this experience. Thus, overall, we see no consensus on methods and measurements

in the workplace incivility domain; instead, researchers use a wide array of methods and instruments. The use of

such a wide diversity of methods and measures has made the body of research on incivility as a whole difﬁcult to

interpret and analyze (e.g., in meta-analytic review or comparisons between studies).

While the divergence of measures is likely a hindrance to the accumulated knowledge, the divergence of methods

may actually be an asset to this growing body of work. The practice of “converging operations”(Cronbach, 1960;

Cronbach & Meehl, 1955) notes that relationships among constructs that are demonstrated using diverse research

operations (e.g., behavioral, psychological, cognitive, neuropsychological, and self-report) are especially convincing

and meaningful, because it demonstrates that ﬁndings are not conﬁned by one mere operationalization. The use of

only one speciﬁc methodology may be too broad or insufﬁciently inclusive to capture the construct’s true domain.

In the ﬁeld of workplace incivility, researchers applied the important notion of convergence of operations (different

methods, measures, and operationalizations) to show the effects of incivility, which makes the credibility of work-

place incivility ﬁndings especially persuasive.

Other domains that assess incivility (e.g., the group norm level and the organizational level) also show effects on

theory-driven outcome variables, such as job satisfaction (Walsh et al., 2012) and turnover intentions (Grifﬁn, 2010;

Walsh et al., 2012). Moreover, other methodologies for studying consequences of uncivil conduct, such as by exper-

imental manipulation or as captured by the critical incident methodology showed relationships with theoretically

relevant outcomes, such as performance (Giumetti, Hatﬁeld, Scisco, Schroeder, Muth, & Kowalski, 2013; Porath

& Erez, 2007), retaliation (Kim & Shapiro, 2008), and helpfulness (Porath & Erez, 2007). In sum, we believe that

the study of incivility with many different methodologies that converge to indicate the antecedents and impacts of

incivility in a wide array of domains represents a strength of this literature.

An infrequently employed research methodology for workplace incivility is qualitative or interview-based

inquiry. While some authors have provided illustrative quotes from research participants to support their hypothesis

or proposition development (e.g., Cameron & Webster, 2011; Cortina, 2008), the grounded theory approach of

inductively generating theory based on participant accounts has been under-employed in this domain (see Cortina

et al., 2002, for an exception). A grounded theory approach may be especially helpful to uncover the complexity

of the cognitive experiences targets and witnesses live through as they begin to make sense of this ambiguous

conduct. Moreover, an inductive qualitative approach may provide valuable insight into perpetrators’motivations

to instigate workplace incivility.

A research methodology that thus far has not been used to study incivility and could be an important addition to

the research on workplace incivility is that of implicit measures. The use of implicit methods has gained popularity

in recent years across a multitude of domains (e.g., diversity, job attitudes, and leadership). An advantage of implicit

measures is that they do not rely on introspection (Isen & Erez 2007) or participants’accurate and full awareness of

how or why they feel, think, react, or behave in a certain way. Implicit measures may be especially helpful to further

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S63

DOI: 10.1002/job

incivility research because the impact of incivility may span far beyond what targets or witnesses may introspec-

tively realize or convey. This is especially relevant because research (Porath & Erez, 2007) has indicated that

experienced incivility inﬂuences cognitions and behaviors that the targets may not have consciously identiﬁed.

Reference Periods

Incivility researchers examined incivility from a wide variety of reference periods. In fact, effects of incivility have

been assessed immediately following uncivil or rude treatment and up to 5 years after the experience of incivility.

The WIS asks participants to report the frequency with which they experienced incivility during the past 5 years,

and several studies have used this reference period (e.g., Lim & Lee, 2011; Miner-Rubino & Cortina, 2004).

However, the reference period participants are asked to consider when reporting incivility differs widely among

the extant studies. For example, Chen et al. (2013), Cortina et al. (2001), Taylor, Bedeian, and Kluemper (2012),

Walsh et al. (2012), and Ferguson (2012) ask for its frequency over the past year. Wilson and Holmvall (2013)

ask about incivility experiences over the past 6 months. Blau (2007) inquires about incivility over the past 4 months,

while Scott et al. (2013) ask about incivility during the past 3 months. Sakurai and Jex (2012), Leiter et al. (2011),

Sliter et al. (2012), and Van Jaarsveld et al. (2010) asked about incivility over the past month, while Kern and

Grandey (2009) inquire about uncivil incidents that happened during the past 2 weeks. Still others indicate no

reference period for the incivility questions (e.g., Grifﬁn, 2010; Sliter et al., 2010).

Usually, researchers decide on a speciﬁc reference period based on the frequency of the event that is being rated or

considered (Igou, Bless, & Schwarz, 2002; Schaeffer & Presser, 2003). For infrequent events, researchers prefer a

longer reference period in order to minimize the number of participants who report nonoccurrence of the event in

that time frame. For frequent events, researchers often choose a shorter reference period because study participants

may have forgotten occurrences of frequent experiences that happened in the more distal past (Igou et al., 2002).

Hence, it is noteworthy that there is a lack of agreement regarding the most appropriate reference period for measur-

ing incivility. This is problematic not only because it makes it difﬁcult to integrate and interpret the research ﬁndings

as a whole but also because the reference period may profoundly inﬂuence how participants interpret the questions

asked. That is, the reference period may prime the types and severity of the experiences participants recollect, which,

in turn, is also likely to inﬂuence participants’perceptions of the effects that these incidents had on variables of in-

terest (Schaeffer & Presser, 2003). Indeed, more proximal incivility experiences that may not have been cognitively

understood or affectively resolved may seem much more impactful than instances that happened years ago and have

been cognitively and emotionally processed by targets of incivility.

A further shortcoming of the varying reference periods in this research domain is that participants may use the

indicated reference period to determine the intended meaning of the question. For example, respondents who are

asked to answer the question “How often have your superiors or coworkers made demeaning or derogatory remarks

about you today”may infer that the question refers to relatively frequent incidents, because otherwise it would not

make sense to focus on a single day. In contrast, the question “During the past 5 years, how often have your

superiors or coworkers made demeaning or derogatory remarks about you”may lead respondents to assume that

the researchers are interested in relatively rare and more severe or noteworthy incidences. Why else would the

researcher ask them about occurrences during such a long period (Igou et al., 2002)?

Research on anger experiences supports the idea that the reference period affects respondents’interpretations of

the questions they are asked to answer. For instance, Winkielman, Knäuper, and Schwarz (1998) showed that

participants who answered the question “How frequently do you get angry during a typical year”assumed that

the question referred to more intense and less frequent anger experiences than participants who answered the

question “How frequent do you get angry during a typical week.”Hence, the use of different reference periods might

severely inﬂuence research results and hinder the interpretation and integration of the existing body of work on

workplace incivility.

S64 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

We also assert that more research investigating incivility as a discrete event is needed. The majority of workplace

incivility research focuses on uncivil incidents that took place during a period of months to years. This research then

examines the impact of incivility on employees’longer-term attitudes and behaviors. However, incivility episodes

also have important immediate or short-term consequences. Scholars employing a scenario or experimental method-

ology to study incivility (e.g., Porath & Erez, 2007; 2009) study the immediate effects of uncivil behavior, which

provides insight into its short-term effects. Research that focuses on short-term effects of workplace incivility is

important as it can improve knowledge of causal effects within this research domain and thus create more precise

theory (Mitchell & James, 2001). Indeed, the immediate effects of workplace incivility on targets’and witnesses’

mood or cognitive memory (Porath & Erez, 2007, 2009) may not linger into the more distal future.

Sources of incivility in the workplace: supervisors, coworkers, and customers

The majority of research on incivility lumps incivility from supervisors and coworkers (and sometimes even cus-

tomers) together, without differentiating the potentially diverse impact of each source. Indeed, even though the

WIS (Cortina et al., 2001), the most frequently used instrument to study workplace incivility, does not include

customer-instigated incivility, it does not separate supervisor-initiated from coworker-initiated incivility. However,

some researchers do speciﬁcally assess both coworker-instigated and supervisor-instigated incivility. For instance,

Leiter et al. (2010) examined generational differences in experiencing incivility perpetrated separately by supervi-

sors and coworkers, and three studies examined the effectiveness of civility interventions on the occurrence of

supervisor and coworker incivility separately (Leiter et al., 2011, 2012; Spence Laschinger et al., 2012). These latter

studies showed that supervisor but not coworker incivility decreased after the intervention took place. However,

these studies do not compare the outcomes of incivility from these different sources. Hence, we currently know

relatively little about whether incivility from different sources (supervisor, coworker, and customer) would lead to

different outcomes, even though status and role differentials may in fact inﬂuence the severity and content of the

impact and the manner in which targets react to the uncivil incident (Hershcovis & Barling, 2010).

It is, for instance, likely that supervisory uncivil behavior is more harmful than coworker incivility, because em-

ployees who are targets of such behaviors depend on their supervisors for evaluations and rewards. Targets of super-

visory incivility may, therefore, assume that their supervisor’s uncivil behaviors may generalize and bring along other

unfavorable events. In a similar vein, coworker incivility may be more harmful than customer incivility, because em-

ployees may encounter an uncivil customer only once but will have to face an uncivil coworker over and over again.

Indirect support for some of these expectations comes from a recent meta-analysis on the outcomes of workplace

aggression (in the forms of workplace bullying, mobbing, social undermining, aggression, victimization, interper-

sonal conﬂict, tyranny, abusive supervision, and workplace incivility) from different perpetrators (Hershcovis &

Barling, 2010). Speciﬁcally, this meta-analysis showed that workplace aggression perpetrated by a supervisor has

stronger effects than coworker-perpetrated aggression on job satisfaction, affective commitment, turnover intent,

health, organizational deviance, and job performance. Moreover, coworker aggression had a stronger impact on

job satisfaction, affective commitment, turnover intent, interpersonal deviance, and physical well-being than aggres-

sion perpetrated by outsiders. Unfortunately, only three of the empirical articles included in this meta-analysis report

relationships of workplace incivility with the outcome variables. Hence, assuming that incivility is different from

other forms of aggressive behavior, this study only provides limited insight into the role of sources on the outcomes

of experienced incivility. In addition to the meta-analytic ﬁndings, several research endeavors have addressed the

effects of uncivil conduct from different sources. For example, Porath and Erez (2007) showed that the participants

who either experienced an uncivil incident from an authority ﬁgure or a stranger or only imagined an uncivil incident

all had lower task and creative performance than participants in the control condition. While these effects were found

in different studies using different samples and thus the relative effect sizes cannot be directly compared, this study

indicates that regardless of source, incivility experiences negatively impacted various organizationally relevant out-

comes. In a later study, Porath and Erez (2009) showed that participants who witnessed either one of their peers or an

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S65

DOI: 10.1002/job

authority ﬁgure behaving in an uncivil manner had lower performance on routine and creative tasks, engaged less in

citizenship behaviors, and had higher dysfunctional ideation than participants in the control condition. In contrast to

the Porath and Erez studies, which did not ﬁnd that the source of incivility made much of a difference, other studies

found that the source of incivility did matter. Work by Spence Laschinger et al. (2009) showed that both supervisor

and coworker incivility explained incremental variance in employees’job satisfaction, commitment, and turnover

intentions. Oore et al. (2010) examined the differential effects of workplace incivility from supervisors and co-

workers on the relationship between work stressors and strain. The results indicated that coworker but not

supervisor incivility strengthened the relationships between employees’workload and mental health and job control

and mental health and that supervisor but not coworker incivility strengthened the relationship between workload

and physical health. Using a student sample in an educational setting, Barker Caza and Cortina (2007) separated

out the effects of experienced lateral incivility (by a fellow student) and top-down incivility (by a faculty, staff, or

administration member) and found that top-down incivility has a stronger impact on perceived injustice than lateral

incivility. Grifﬁn (2010) assessed coworker incivility and the higher-level construct “incivility environment”and

found unique effects of both sources of incivility on intent to remain with the organization. Perhaps, the source of

incivility makes a difference with regard to attitudes and intentions, but not with regard to actual behaviors and

performance as investigated in the Porath and Erez (2007, 2009) studies because the processes by which incivility

affects attitudes and behaviors may be different. Future research is needed in order to clarify this issue.

Although these studies have assessed incivility stemming from different sources, other scholars have chosen to

study just one group of perpetrators. For example, Van Jaarsveld et al. (2010) examined the consequences of cus-

tomer incivility on call center workers, and Sliter et al. (2010) explored bank tellers’reactions to customer incivility.

Lim and Teo (2009) focused on consequences of supervisors’uncivil cyber behaviors toward their employees, and Kim

and Shapiro (2008) manipulated supervisory incivility in a scenario presented to participants in order to gauge partici-

pants’reactions. Scott et al. (2013) examined reactions to coworkers who instigated coworker incivility, Totterdell et al.

(2012) captured the effects of witnessing uncivil coworker behaviors, and Ferguson (2012) and Sakurai and Jex (2012)

studied the effects of experiencing coworker incivility. Thus, while incivility can stem from and may be directed toward

various sources, we currently do not have a thorough understanding of the differences in effects and effect sizes when

the sources of incivility vary. Consequently, the work on incivility would beneﬁt from learning about the correlates,

antecedents, processes, and outcomes of incivility by source. Such research would illuminate potential source

differences in these realms. Moreover, accumulated ﬁndings, varied by source, would allow for the quantitative or

meta-analytic review of the effect sizes among sources, in turn allowing for source comparisons.

Having analyzed the body of work amassed on workplace incivility as a whole, in the next part of the manuscript,

we outline the three types of incivility (experienced, witnessed, and instigated) and discuss the ﬁndings for these

three distinct bodies of work that largely comprise the extant workplace incivility research.

Types of Incivility: Experienced, Witnessed, and Instigated

Our review of the incivility literature clearly shows that the uncivil experiences that have been studied vary greatly.

Not only do incivility incidents differ with regard to their source (i.e., supervisor, coworker, or customer), they also

differ with regard to the type of incivility (i.e., experienced, witnessed, or instigated). In addition, studies of incivility

vary by method of inquiry (i.e., critical incidents, questionnaires, experimental research, diary studies, and qualita-

tive inquiry) and by time frame (i.e., retrospective, cross-sectional, and longitudinal). This diversity of research

makes incivility ﬁndings difﬁcult to interpret. For researchers, the lack of consistent ﬁndings may conceal gaps in

the literature and makes it difﬁcult to identify avenues for future research. For practitioners, the lack of comprehen-

sive ﬁndings may prevent taking of adequate measures to diminish uncivil conduct in their organizations. To provide

an accessible overview of the current state of incivility research, we will next summarize the research ﬁndings for each

S66 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

of the types of incivility. Speciﬁcally, we will provide an outline, in narrative, table, and ﬁgure forms, of the ﬁndings that

have amassed about experienced, witnessed, and instigated incivility to provide this much needed clarity.

Experienced incivility

Most research on incivility focuses on experienced incivility (45 out of 55 papers) and, more speciﬁcally, on the

various outcomes for targets of uncivil conduct. Some researchers have sought to study what makes one a likely

target of incivility. We will start this section with a description of the various antecedents of experienced incivility

that have been studied. Thereafter, we will describe the various consequences of experienced incivility.

Antecedents of experienced incivility

Antecedents to experienced incivility include dispositional, behavioral, and contextual aspects that predict experiencing un-

civil workplace conduct. After that, we describe the consequences of uncivil experiences for the targets of uncivil conduct.

Dispositional antecedents of experienced incivility. Some studies have examined diversity or dispositional target

attributes to learn about antecedents of receiving rude treatment. These studies have shown that the individual

difference variables that are associated with more frequent experiences of workplace incivility include being a racial

minority (Cortina, Kabat-Farr, Leskinen, Huerta, & Magley, 2013), younger in age (Lim & Lee, 2011), generation X

versus belonging to the baby boomer generation (Leiter et al., 2010), adipose (Sliter et al., 2012a), disagreeable, and

neurotic (Milam, Spitzmueller, & Penney, 2009). Interestingly, research that examines the association between

gender and experiencing incivility shows contradictory ﬁndings. Lim and Lee (2011) found that men report they

experience incivility in greater frequency than women, whereas Cortina et al. (2001) and Cortina et al. (2013) found

that women report more uncivil encounters than men.

Behavioral antecedents of experienced incivility. Other scholars have sought to study which target behaviors make

individuals more likely to become the target of others’incivility or which situational characteristics might reduce

experienced incivility. The target behaviors that have been found to predict experienced incivility include the

target’s organizational and interpersonal counterproductive behavior (Meier & Spector, 2013) and having a high

dominating or a low integrating conﬂict management style (Trudel & Reio, 2011).

Situational antecedents of experienced incivility. Situational variables that reduce experienced incivility include

higher workgroup norms for civility (Walsh et al., 2012) and experiencing low role stressors (Taylor & Kluemper,

2012). Given the high prevalence and costs of workplace incivility, it is noteworthy that three studies found support

for the effectiveness of a team-based intervention for reducing supervisor-perpetrated (but not coworker-perpetrated)

incivility (Leiter et al., 2011, 2012; Spence Laschinger et al., 2012). This so-called Civility, Respect, and Engage-

ment in the Workforce intervention has been initiated by the Veterans Health Administration in the United States

and was aimed to increase civility in the workplace (Osatuke, Moore, Ward, Dyrenforth, & Belton, 2009) through

supporting workgroups in identifying their strengths and weaknesses regarding civil workplace behaviors, designing

their own interventions, and implementing these interventions in their work setting.

While the aforementioned studies shed some light on the antecedents of experienced workplace incivility, this

body of work is quite small and mainly focuses on targets’demographics and behaviors, and on situational variables.

Thus, many more studies are needed in this area of studies in order to replicate and verify these results. In addition,

there are likely many other unexplored relevant target attributes, such as targets’skills or capabilities or experienced

favoritism, which may be potential antecedents of experienced incivility. For example, we would expect that being

favored by an authority ﬁgure would invite rudeness by others in one’s work setting, as spurred by feelings of

unfairness and envy. Alternatively, targets’low competence might invite incivility by others, especially if others’

success is inﬂuenced by the less competent target.

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S67

DOI: 10.1002/job

Consequences for targets of uncivil experiences

Most empirical studies on experienced workplace incivility have focused on the consequences of experiencing

incivility in the workplace. Experiencing workplace incivility is found to be related to various affective, attitudinal,

cognitive, and behavioral outcomes for targets.

Affective outcomes of experienced incivility. Some of the general affective outcomes for targets of incivility include

heightened emotionality (Bunk & Magley, 2013), emotional labor (Adams & Webster, 2013; Sliter et al., 2010),

emotional exhaustion (Kern & Grandey, 2009; Sliter et al., 2010), depression (Lim & Lee, 2011; Miner et al.,

2010), negative emotions (Kim & Shapiro, 2008; Sakurai & Jex, 2012), negative affect and lower positive affect

(Giumetti et al., 2013), and lower affective trust (Cameron & Webster, 2011). Targets of incivility also report lower

levels of energy (Giumetti et al., 2013) and increased levels of stress (Adams & Webster, 2013; Cortina et al., 2001;

Kern & Grandey, 2009; Lim & Cortina, 2005; Miner et al., 2010). Speciﬁc emotional reactions of targets of

workplace incivility include increased anger, fear, and sadness (Porath & Pearson, 2012) and reduced optimism

(Bunk & Magley, 2013). To boot, recent work has shown that workplace incivility not only affects employees at

work but also affects targets’personal lives, as its experience is linked with decreased levels of well-being (Cortina

et al., 2001; Lim & Cortina, 2005, Lim et al., 2008) and marital satisfaction (Ferguson, 2012) and increased levels of

work–family conﬂict (Ferguson, 2012; Lim & Lee, 2011).

Attitudinal outcomes of experienced incivility. Incivility also inﬂuences targets’attitudes, in both the work and life do-

mains. For example, targets of uncivil conduct are less committed to their organization (Lim & Teo, 2009), are less motivated

(Sakurai & Jex, 2012), and have lower satisfaction with their supervisors and coworkers (Bunk & Magley, 2013), their job

(Cortina et al., 2001; Lim & Cortina, 2005; Lim et al., 2008; Miner-Rubino & Reed, 2010; Wilson & Holmvall, 2013), and

their life (Lim & Cortina, 2005; Miner et al., 2010) than employees who do not experience incivility at work.

Cognitive outcomes of experienced incivility. In addition to affective and attitudinal reactions, targets of incivility

also have cognitive reactions to their uncivil experiences. Speciﬁcally, uncivil encounters lower targets’perceived

fairness (Lim & Lee, 2011) and task-related memory recall (Porath & Erez, 2007).

Behavioral outcomes of experienced incivility. Experienced incivility is also associated with a set of counterproduc-

tive behavioral responses in its targets. Research has indicated, for example, that experienced incivility incites tar-

gets to reciprocate (Bunk & Magley, 2013) and to engage in retaliatory (Kim & Shapiro, 2008), deviant (Lim & Teo,

2009), and counterproductive (Penney & Spector, 2005) behaviors at work. Moreover, employees who are targets of

workplace incivility also show decrements in various performance-related domains, such as task performance (Chen

et al., 2013; Giumetti et al., 2013; Porath & Erez, 2007; Sliter et al., 2012b), creativity (Porath & Erez, 2007), and

citizenship behavior (Porath & Erez, 2007; Taylor et al., 2012). Another behavioral reaction found in targets of un-

civil behavior is withdrawal from work. Research has shown that experienced incivility relates to decreased work

engagement (Chen et al., 2013), decreased career salience (Lim & Teo, 2009), and heightened levels of

absenteeism (Sliter et al., 2012), withdrawal behavior (Cortina et al., 2001; Lim & Corina, 2005; Matin & Hine,

2005), turnover intentions (Grifﬁn, 2010; Lim et al., 2008; Miner-Rubino & Reed, 2010; Wilson & Holmvall,

2013), and organizational exit (Porath & Pearson, 2012).

The preceding summary shows that the extant research on experienced workplace incivility has addressed a wide

array of outcomes. Work on the outcomes of experienced workplace incivility may be expanded to investigate more

qualiﬁers, including mediators, moderators, and boundary conditions of the relationships between workplace incivil-

ity and outcomes. Future research may examine conditions that attenuate or strengthen the effects of experienced

incivility. It is possible, for instance, that employees who have previously worked in a rude work environment

may not be as affected by workplace incivility as their peers who have had little previous rudeness experiences. It

is also conceivable that social support from supervisors and coworkers could buffer the negative effects of customer

incivility on targets’emotions, cognitions, and behaviors.

S68 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

Please see Table 1 for an extensive overview of the studies on experienced incivility. This table provides the sources

of the uncivil conduct, the samples employed, and the study ﬁndings. The top half of Table 1 lists research that exam-

ined antecedents of experienced incivility; the second part of the table lists studies that examined outcomes of experi-

enced incivility. Figure 2 gives a graphical representation of the antecedents and outcomes of experienced incivility.

Witnessed incivility

Compared with the number of empirical papers that address experienced incivility (45 out of 55), the number of

studies that examined witnessed workplace incivility is rather small (4 papers out of 55). The empirical papers that

have been published in this realm convey that female witnesses of uncivil incidents consider these incidents as more

inappropriate than their male counterparts (Montgomery et al., 2004). Another study showed that witnessing incivil-

ity results in higher levels of witnesses’negative affect, reduces their task performance, creative performance, and

helpfulness toward others, and increases dysfunctional ideation (Porath & Erez, 2009). Totterdell et al. (2012) found

not only that witnessing incivility relates to negative affect but also that incivility predicts emotional exhaustion, es-

pecially when the witness took the target’s perspective and when he or she directly witnessed rather than heard about

the uncivil incident. The fourth study on witnessed incivility has shown that individuals who witness uncivil behav-

ior toward women report lower levels of health satisfaction and display more work withdrawal, especially in work

groups with higher proportions of male group members (Miner-Rubino & Cortina, 2004).

The topic of witnessed incivility may be classiﬁed as a developing area of study with many gaps and opportunities

for future research. Perhaps research in this domain could seek to investigate antecedents to witnessed incivility. We

may expect that interdependent self-managed teams working on highly innovative endeavors might frequently wit-

ness incivility behavior. We may expect such a team setting to be an especially incivility-prone environment given

that better solutions in innovative work are typically not clear and the team needs to reach a decision rather than

merely implement a dictated choice. These debates may spike incivility behaviors. Moreover, perhaps extraversion,

especially the sociability factor, would predict witnessing incivility behavior given that sociable extraverts might

ﬁnd themselves more frequently present in social interaction events.

Please see Table 2 for an overview of the studies on witnessed incivility. This table provides the sources of the

uncivil conduct, the samples employed, and the study ﬁndings. Figure 3 provides a graphical representation of

the effects of witnessing rudeness.

Instigated incivility

As noted, the work on instigated incivility studies the perpetrators of uncivil conduct as the focal entity of study and

investigates what prompts employees to act uncivilly and what the outcomes are for these instigators. The literature

on instigated workplace incivility is also substantially smaller (8 papers out of 55) than that on experienced incivility

(45 papers out of 55) and focuses on perpetrators’characteristics, attitudes, perceptions, and situational variables as

antecedents of perpetrators’uncivil conduct. Of note is that one study examined the outcomes of uncivil encounters

for the perpetrators themselves.

Antecedents of perpetrating incivility

Characteristics of the perpetrator

Research has indicated that perpetrator characteristics such as higher levels of power (Cortina et al., 2001), trait

anger (Meier & Semmer, 2013), and having a dominating conﬂict management style or a non-integrative conﬂict

management style (Trudel & Reio, 2011) positively relate to instigated incivility.

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S69

DOI: 10.1002/job

Table 1. Experienced incivility—antecedents and outcomes

Study Sample Source Antecedents Outcomes Key ﬁndings

Cameron and

Webster (2011)

StudyResponse Communication

partner

Multi-communication

indicators

Various multi-communication indicators

are associated with rated incivility.

Cortina et al. (2013) Municipality,

law

enforcement,

military

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Gender, race,

workgroup

composition

Female gender and minority race status

are associated with more experienced

incivility. The higher the workgroup

proportion of men, the more incivility

was experienced.

Cortina et al. (2001) Federal court

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Gender Women experienced greater frequency

of incivility than men did.

Leiter et al. (2011,

2012), Spence

Lashinger et al.

(2012)

Healthcare

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Civility

intervention

A 6-month civility intervention

signiﬁcantly reduced experienced

supervisor, but not coworker incivility

post-intervention.

Leiter et al. (2012) Healthcare

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Civility

intervention

One year after the civility intervention

experienced, supervisor incivility was

lower than control and than scores pre-

intervention and immediately post-

intervention.

Leiter et al. (2010) Nurses Coworkers,

supervisors,

team

Generation X,

baby boomer

generation

Generation X nurses report more

coworker, supervisory, and team

incivility than baby boomer generation

nurses.

Lim and Lee (2011) Full-time

employees in

Singapore

Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Source of

incivility, age and

gender of target

Employees received the most incivility

from supervisors followed by coworkers

and then from subordinates. Younger

employees reported more incivility than

older workers, and men reported greater

levels than women.

Meier and Spector

(2013)

Employees

from

various

organizations

Coworkers,

supervisors

Counterproductive

work behavior at

several time points

Interpersonal counterproductive work

behavior predicted incivility 2, 4, 6, and

8 months later. Organizational

counterproductivity predicted incivility 2

and 4 months later.

Milam et al. (2009) Full-time

employees from

various

organizations

Coworkers,

supervisors

Agreeableness,

neuroticism,

extraversion,

provocative target

Individuals low in agreeableness and

high in neuroticism report more incivility.

Coworkers’appraisals of being a

provocative target for incivility mediate

the relationships between both coworker-

reported agreeableness and neuroticism

with incivility.

Coworkers,

supervisors

Adiposity, gender,

race

Adiposity was positively related to

incivility. Being obese was related to the

S70 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

Sliter, Sliter,

Withrow, and Jex

(2012)

Undergraduate

working

students

highest levels, and being underweight

was positively related to incivility for

men only. A signiﬁcant three-way

interaction indicates that White adipose

women received the highest levels of

incivility, followed by Black women,

then White men, and ﬁnally Black men.

Taylor and

Kluemper (2012)

Employees

from

various

organizations

Coworkers,

supervisors

Role ambiguity,

role conﬂict

Role ambiguity and role conﬂict were

positively related to incivility. The

relationship between role ambiguity and

incivility is stronger for employees high

in neuroticism.

Trudel and Reio

(2011)

Healthcare and

manufacturing

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Conﬂict

management

styles, gender

Experienced incivility is positively

related to having a dominating conﬂict

management style and negatively related

to having an integrating conﬂict

management style. Women were more

likely to be targets of incivility.

Walsh et al. (2012) State

government

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Workgroup norms

for civility

Workgroup norms for civility were

negatively related to supervisor and

coworker incivility from 4 months later.

Adams and Webster

(2013)

University

alumni,

engineering

ﬁrm

employees

Customers,

coworkers

Abusive supervision,

surface acting, distress

Experienced incivility by customers and

coworkers was positively linked with

surface acting and distress. The

relationships between customer and

coworker incivility and distress were

partially mediated by surface acting.

Barker Caza and

Cortina (2007)

Undergraduate

students

Top-down

(higher-status)

and lateral

(same-status)

people

Perceived ostracism,

perceived injustice

Top-down and lateral incivility are

positively linked to perceived ostracism,

psychological distress, and academic

disengagement. Top-down incivility is

linked with perceived injustice.

Bunk and Magley

(2013)

Employees

from

various

organizations

Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Emotionality,

reciprocation, optimism,

satisfaction

The relationship between incivility and

reciprocation is mediated by

emotionality. The relationship between

speciﬁc incident incivility frequency and

supervisor and coworker satisfaction is

mediated by optimism (reverse coded).

Cameron and

Webster (2011)

StudyResponse

paid survey

takers

Communication

partner

Affective trust Higher perceptions of incivility in the

context of multi-communication were

associated with lower affective trust of

the focal individual.

Chen et al. (2013) Manufacturing,

property

Coworkers,

supervisors

Work engagement, task

performance, narcissism

The negative relationship between

incivility and task performance is

(Continues)

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S71

DOI: 10.1002/job

Table 1. (Continued)

Study Sample Source Antecedents Outcomes Key ﬁndings

company,

and department

store employees

China

mediated by work engagement. This

mediated relationship is stronger for

those higher in narcissism.

Cortina and Magley

(2009)

University

employees,

attorneys, court

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Frequency and variety of

incivility, instigator power,

target appraisal, coping

reactions

Incivility triggers mild emotional

appraisals. Frequent incivility, varied

incivility, and higher instigator power

are appraised more negatively by targets.

Few targets (1–6%) responded to

experienced incivility by reporting it to

organizational authorities.

Cortina et al. (2001) Federal court

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Job satisfaction, job

withdrawal, career

salience, psychological

well-being, and distress

Incivility was related to lower job

satisfaction, career salience, and

psychological well-being and to higher

job withdrawal and psychological

distress.

Cortina et al. (2002) Federal court

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Avoidance, denial Most targets of incivility respond with

avoidance and denial.

Cortina et al. (2013) Municipality,

law

enforcement,

military

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Turnover intentions Experienced incivility is linked with

turnover intentions.

Diefendorff and

Croyle (2008)

Customer

service

and sales

workers

Customer

interaction

Expectancy motivation,

emotional labor

Employee expectancy, valence,

motivational force, and display rule

commitment were lower in an uncivil

customer interaction.

Ferguson (2012) Employees and

their partners

Coworkers Marital satisfaction,

partner marital

satisfaction, partner

family-to-work conﬂict

Incivility negatively predicts target

employee marital satisfaction as

mediated by stress transmission.

Incivility predicts partner marital

satisfaction and family-to-work conﬂict

as mediated by the target’s stress

transmission from work to family

domains.

Giumetti et al.

(2013)

Undergraduate

students

Supervisor Cognitive, emotional, and

social energy, task

performance, task

engagement, positive and

negative affect

Participants’cognitive, emotional, and

social energy levels were lower in the

cyber incivility condition relative to the

cyber supportive condition. Incivility

yielded decreased positive affect, task

performance, and engagement and

S72 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

higher negative affect in participants.

Less emotional energy mediated the

relationship between supervisor

incivility and task performance, and less

social energy mediated the relationship

with task engagement.

Grifﬁn (2010) Australian and

New Zealand

employees

Coworkers Organizational and

individual incivility intent

to stay, interactional

justice climate

Organization-level incivility positively

predicts intent to stay over and above

individual-level incivility. Interactional

justice climate mediates the relationship

between organization-level incivility and

intent to stay.

Kern and Grandey

(2009)

Retail

employees

Customer Racial identity centrality,

stress, emotional

exhaustion

For employees with stronger racial

identity centrality, customer incivility is

more strongly related to emotional

exhaustion as mediated by higher stress

appraisal.

Kim and Shapiro

(2008)

American and

Korean

executive

Master in

Business

Administration

students

Supervisor Supervisory and

organizational retaliatory

behavior, negative

emotions, collectivism

Participants in the rudeness (vs. polite)

condition displayed more supervisory

and organizational retaliatory behavior;

negative emotions partially mediated

these relationships. Targets retaliate

more when the supervisor was dissimilar

to them. Those targets with high

collectivism are less likely to retaliate

against rude supervisors who are similar

to them.

Lim and Cortina

(2005)

Female federal

judicial circuit

court

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Harassment, stress,

satisfaction, withdrawal,

well-being

Incivility was positively related to sexual

and gender harassment, job withdrawal,

and stress and negatively related to all

facets of job satisfaction, life and health

satisfaction, and well-being.

Lim et al. (2008) Federal judicial

court

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors,

individual and

workgroup

levels

Job satisfaction, turnover

intentions, mental and

physical health

Personal and workgroup incivility are

negatively linked with mental health and

job satisfaction. Job satisfaction partially

mediated the relationship between

incivility and turnover intentions. Mental

health partially mediated the relationship

between incivility and physical health.

Lim and Lee (2011) Full-time

Singaporean

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Family support, perceived

fairness, coworker

satisfaction, work-to-

family conﬂict

Supervisor incivility was associated with

higher work-to-family conﬂict.

Coworker incivility was positively

linked with depression and negatively

linked with coworker satisfaction and

(Continues)

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S73

DOI: 10.1002/job

Table 1. (Continued)

Study Sample Source Antecedents Outcomes Key ﬁndings

perceived fairness. These relationships

are stronger for those employees with

more family support.

Lim and Teo (2009) Singaporean

banking and

ﬁnancial

services

employees

Supervisors Organizational

commitment, job

satisfaction, turnover

intentions, deviance

Cyber incivility was negatively related to

organizational commitment and job

satisfaction and positively linked to

turnover intentions and workplace deviance.

Martin and Hine

(2005)

Employees

from

various

Australian

organizations

Coworkers,

supervisors

Coworker, supervisor, and

health satisfaction, work

withdrawal, psychological

well-being

Incivility sub-factors were related to

criteria. Hostility was negatively related to

supervisor satisfaction, privacy was

positively related to withdrawal, exclusion

was negatively related to coworker and

supervisor satisfaction and well-being, and

gossiping was negatively linked to

coworker and health satisfaction and

positively linked to work withdrawal.

Miner et al. (2012) Property

management

company

employees,

students

Coworkers,

supervisors,

fellow students

Emotional and

organizational support, job

stress, depression, job and

life satisfaction, physical

illness

Incivility is positively linked with job

stress and depression and negatively

linked with job and life satisfaction.

Support buffers the effects of incivility on

job satisfaction, job stress, physical illness,

depression, and life satisfaction

Miner-Rubino and

Reed (2010)

Property

management

employees

Workgroup

members

Organizational trust,

turnover intentions,

burnout, job satisfaction,

group regard

Organizational trust mediated the

relationship between workgroup

incivility and turnover intention,

burnout, and job satisfaction. Group

regard moderated the negative

relationship between workgroup

incivility and organizational trust.

Oore et al. (2010) Healthcare

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Workload, job control,

mental health, physical

health, civility intervention

Incivility from coworkers strengthened

the relationship between both workload

stress and low job control stress with

mental health. Supervisory incivility

strengthened the relationship between

workload and physical health. The

negative relationship between work

overload and mental health was reduced for

those healthcare workers who took part in a

6-month civility training intervention.

Penney and Spector

(2005)

Employed

students

Coworkers,

supervisors

Job satisfaction,

counterproductive work

Incivility was negatively related to job

satisfaction. Incivility was positively

S74 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

behavior, trait-based

negative affectivity

related to counterproductive work

behavior, especially for employees high in

trait negative affectivity.

Porath and Erez

(2007)

Undergraduate

students

Authority ﬁgure,

third party,

imagined

rudeness

Task and creative

performance, helpfulness,

memory recall

Rudeness reduces performance, creative

performance, helpfulness, and memory

recall. Memory recall mediates the

relationship between incivility and task

performance.

Porath et al. (2008) Master in

Business

Administration

and

undergraduate

students

Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Aggressive and avoidant

responding to incivility,

legitimacy, gender, status

Being male and of high status were more

strongly associated with an aggressive

response to incivility, and being female and

of low status were more strongly associated

with an avoidant response to incivility. Men

were more likely to retaliate against peer

incivility, especially by male perpetrators.

Incivility by higher-status perpetrators was

rated more legitimate.

Porath and Pearson

(2012)

Employed

Master

in Business

Administration

students

Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Anger, fear, sadness,

absenteeism, exit,

displacement on the

organization

Incivility was associated with target

anger, fear, sadness, displacement on the

organization, absenteeism, and exit. Fear

mediated the relationship between incivility

and absenteeism and exit. Sadness mediated

the relationship between incivility and

absenteeism.

Sakurai and Jex

(2012)

Full-time

university

employees

Coworkers Negative emotions, work

effort, counterproductive

work behavior

Negative emotions mediate the

relationship between incivility and

counterproductive work behavior.

Negative emotions mediate the

relationship between incivility and work

effort at lower supervisory social support

levels.

Sliter et al. (2010) Bank tellers Customer Emotional exhaustion,

customer service quality,

emotional labor

Customer incivility is positively related to

emotional exhaustion, faking positive

emotions, and suppressing negative

emotions and negatively related to customer

service quality. Emotional labor mediates

the relationship between incivility and

emotional exhaustion and customer service

quality.

Sliter, Sliter and Jex

(2012)

Bank tellers Customers,

coworkers

Sales performance,

absenteeism, tardiness

Coworker incivility is positively linked with

absenteeism. Customer incivility is

negatively linked with sales performance

and positively linked with absenteeism and

tardiness. Absenteeism was highest,

(Continues)

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S75

DOI: 10.1002/job

Table 1. (Continued)

Study Sample Source Antecedents Outcomes Key ﬁndings

and sales performance was lowest when

both customer and coworker incivility were

experienced.

Sliter, Sliter,

Withrow, and Jex

(2012)

Undergraduate

working

students

Coworkers,

supervisors

Withdrawal, gender Incivility is positively associated with

withdrawal for male but not for female

employees.

Smith et al. (2010) Nurses Coworkers,

supervisors

Structural and

psychological

empowerment, age,

affective commitment

Controlling for age, in a model including

structural and psychological

empowerment, coworker incivility

negativelypredicts affective commitment, while

supervisory incivility does not.

Spence Laschinger

et al. (2009)

Nurses Coworkers,

supervisors,

Turnover intent,

job satisfaction,

commitment

Separately measured coworker and

supervisory incivility both positively

predicted turnover intent, and negatively

predicted job satisfaction and organizational

commitment.

Taylor et al. (2012) Undergraduate

working

students

Coworkers,

supervisors

The relationship between incivility and

citizenship behavior is mediated by

affective commitment for employees high in

conscientiousness.

Taylor and

Kluemper (2012)

Employees

from

various

organizations

Coworkers,

supervisors

Enacted aggression Incivility is positively related to enacted

aggression. The relationship between

incivility and enacted aggression is stronger

for employees low in agreeableness.

Wilson and

Holmvall (2013)

Retail sales

employees

Customers Job satisfaction, turnover

intentions, psychological

and job-speciﬁc strain

Customer incivility is negatively related to job

satisfaction and positively related to turnover

intentions and psychological and job-speciﬁc

strain. New scale development validation.

Wu et al. (2013) Chinese

manufacturing

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Interpersonal deviance,

hostile attribution bias,

negative reciprocity

beliefs

Workplace incivility and interpersonal

deviance are positively related when

hostile attribution bias and reciprocity

beliefs are high.

S76 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

Figure 2. Antecedents to and outcomes of experienced incivility

Table 2. Witnessed incivility—outcomes

Study Sample Source Outcomes Key ﬁndings

Miner-Rubino and

Cortina (2004)

Federal court

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Health satisfaction, work

withdrawal

Being witness to incivility toward

women reduced health satisfaction

and increased work withdrawal in

workgroups with a male majority.

Montgomery

et al. (2004)

Undergraduate

students

Video

stimuli

Gender, appropriateness Women rated incivility stimuli as

more inappropriate than men did.

Porath and Erez

(2009)

Undergraduate

students

Authority

ﬁgure, peer

Task performance, creativity,

citizenship behavior, negative

affect, dysfunctional ideation,

competitive/cooperative

conditions

Witnessing rudeness reduced task

performance, creative

performance, and citizenship

behavior and increased

dysfunctional ideation and

negative affect. Negative affect

mediated the relationship between

incivility and task and creative

performance. The effects of

witnessing rudeness are weaker on

those in the competitive rather

than cooperative condition.

Totterdell et al.

(2012)

Hospital staff Coworkers,

supervisors,

subordinates

Emotional depletion Witnessing incivility was related

to negative affective reaction,

which predicted emotional

exhaustion, especially when

taking the target’s perspective and

when witnessing rather than

hearing about the incivility.

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S77

DOI: 10.1002/job

Perpetrators attitudes and perceptions

Instigator attitudes and perceptions also relate to enacted incivility. For example, Blau and Anderson (2005) showed that

lower job satisfaction and perceptions of distributive injustice predicted instigated incivility, and Meier and Semmer

(2013) found that perceived lack of reciprocity, or the perception that one invests more into one’s job than he or she obtains

in return, predicted employees’instigated incivility. In a similar vein, a study that surveyed manufacturing employees of a

pharmaceutical plant that announced it was closing showed that instigated incivility is related to higher perceptions of

contract violation, plant closure illegitimacy, and perceptions of distributive and procedural unfairness (Blau, 2007). This

latter study also indicated that instigators’level of depression and strain positively relate to instigating uncivil conduct.

Situational antecedents

Characteristics of the situation also inﬂuence instigated incivility. For example, employees who participated in a

2-week emotional self-efﬁcacy intervention focused on expressive writing engaged in less post-intervention insti-

gated incivility than colleagues who did not participate in this intervention (Kirk et al., 2011). Another study showed

that being a target of incivility was positively related to instigated incivility (Trudel & Reio, 2011), which is corrob-

orated by a study of Van Jaarsveld et al. (2010) that showed that employees who experience incivility from customers

instigated more incivility toward customers than colleagues who were not subjected to customer incivility. One study

that focused on instigators’outcomes of uncivil conduct showed that call center employees who instigate workplace

incivility are distrusted and ostracized by their coworkers (Scott et al., 2013). Overall, within the body of work on

instigated incivility, many antecedents, outcomes, and mediating and moderating processes still remain to be

explored. One area that is especially unclear is the interpersonal relationship between the instigator and his or her

target of uncivil conduct or the insight into what instigators think about or feel toward their targets. Do they ﬁnd them

irritating and incompetent, do they not like their targets, or do instigators feel that their incivility would alert targets to

address or resolve some form of misconduct?

An interesting proposition in this domain is that that incivility enactment might be a modern way of discrimina-

tion enactment in organizations (Cortina, 2008). Given that overt discriminatory conduct in the form of sexism and

racism are decreasingly tolerated and legislation prohibits such conduct in workplaces, Cortina (2008) suggests that

the stealthy and ambiguous nature of incivility might make more prejudiced individuals more likely to express their

prejudice by instigating incivility toward minority targets. This theoretical notion remains to be tested empirically,

although as we noted when discussing ﬁndings on experienced incivility, research suggests that race and gender

minority status did predict the experience of incivility (Cortina et al., 2013).

Please see Table 3 for an overview of the research on instigated incivility. This table provides the sources of

incivility, the samples of employees, and the study ﬁndings. Figure 4 gives a graphical representation of the results

of the work conducted in this domain.

Figure 3. Outcomes of witnessed incivility

S78 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

Implications

The past 15 years has witnessed important progress in our understanding of the prevalence and impact of workplace

incivility. Not only do we now have insight into a wide range of consequences for targets of uncivil conduct, we

have also begun to understand some of the consequences of uncivil encounters for those who merely witness them.

In addition, researchers made the ﬁrst steps in examining why people engage in uncivil behaviors, that is, the ante-

cedents of instigated workplace incivility.

Our review of the literature clearly shows that the construct of workplace incivility has attracted a large group of

researchers that together produced 55 empirical studies that have been published in a wide variety of management

and psychology journals. These researchers investigated different types of workplace incivility (i.e., experienced,

witnessed, or instigated) and different sources of workplace incivility (i.e., supervisor, coworker, or customer)

and employed samples from many different countries that represent a broad range of professions. Moreover, they

used a variety of methodologies, measurement instruments, and reference periods. Hence, we conclude that the current

state of the incivility literature is characterized as broad and diverse, but also fragmented.

Table 3. Instigated incivility—antecedents and outcomes

Study Sample Targets Antecedents/outcomes Key ﬁndings

Blau and Andersson

(2005)

Working adults Coworkers,

supervisors

Distributive justice, job

satisfaction, work

exhaustion

Time 1 distributive justice and job

satisfaction were negatively related to

instigated incivility at Time 2, and Time 1

workplace exhaustion was positively

related to instigated incivility at time 2.

Blau (2007) Manufacturing

plant

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Contract violation,

distributive and

procedural justice,

depression, strain

Instigated incivility is related to higher

contract violation, strain, and depression and

negatively linked to distributive and

procedural justice and plant closure legitimacy.

Cortina et al. (2001) Federal court

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Power Power is positively related to instigated

incivility.

Kirk et al. (2011) Working adults Coworkers Expressive writing

intervention

A 2-week expressive writing emotional

self-efﬁcacy intervention reduced post-

intervention incivility.

Meier and Semmer

(2013)

Employees

from various

organizations

Coworkers,

supervisors

Lack of reciprocity,

trait, and state anger

Lack of reciprocity, trait, and state anger

predict instigated incivility. The

relationship between lack of reciprocity

and instigated incivility is mediated by

feelings of anger.

Scott et al. (2013) Call center

employees

Coworkers Distrust, exchange

partner quality,

exclusion

Instigated incivility is related to being

excluded; this relationship is mediated by

being distrusted. This relationship is

stronger when the instigator is perceived

as a low-quality exchange partner.

Trudel and Reio

(2011)

Manufacturing

and healthcare

employees

Coworkers,

supervisors

Conﬂict management

styles, experienced

incivility

Instigated incivility is positively related to

being an incivility target and having a

dominating conﬂict management style and

negatively related to having an integrating

conﬂict management style.

Van Jaarsveld et al.

(2010)

Call center

employees

Customers Job demands, emotional

exhaustion, job

demands, experienced

incivility

Experienced customer incivility was

associated with higher employee job

demands and emotional exhaustion, which

related to higher levels of instigated

employee incivility toward customers.

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S79

DOI: 10.1002/job

Another noteworthy characteristic of the literature on workplace incivility is the lack of an overarching or inte-

grated theoretical framework. Andersson and Pearson’s (1999) seminal paper on workplace incivility introduced

the construct of workplace incivility from a social interactionist perspective and positioned workplace incivility as

an interactive event in order to emphasize the role of interpersonal and situational factors that inﬂuence the exchange

of uncivil behaviors. They stated, “The instigator(s), the target(s), the observer(s), and the social context all contrib-

ute to and are affected by an uncivil encounter”(p. 457). Thus far, however, empirical research did not adopt this

social interactionist perspective. Instead, research mainly focused on antecedents and consequences of months or

years of experienced incivility, and the body of work on witnessed and instigated incivility took off without a the-

oretical framework or theoretical guidance. That is, so far, there is no theoretical model that underlies and intercon-

nects research on the antecedents and consequences of experienced, witnessed, and instigated workplace incivility.

Neither did researchers propose broad theoretical models that suggest theoretically grounded antecedents of work-

place incivility, outcomes of uncivil encounters, and the affective, cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral processes

that underlie these outcomes.

Because of the absence of a uniﬁed theoretical framework that could guide empirical research on workplace

incivility, researchers used a variety of theoretical approaches from related research domains to theoretically ground

their hypotheses. Unfortunately, this approach has led to a set of disconnected theories, which include, among

others, power theories (Miner-Rubino & Cortina, 2004), the group identity lens model (Kern & Grandey, 2009),

social exchange theory (Cameron & Webster, 2011; Scott et al., 2013), appraisal theory (Porath & Pearson,

2012), the emotion-centered model of work behavior (Sakurai & Jex, 2012), the Dollard–Miller model of aggression

(Taylor & Kluemper, 2012), and cognitive–motivational–relational theory (Bunk & Magley, 2013). The adoption of

these various theoretical frameworks does show that incivility is a very versatile construct that is well-situated

among many diverse theoretical frameworks and can meaningfully be incorporated into a wide range of theories

from related streams of research. Yet, in the absence of a uniﬁed theoretical model, the incivility literature does

not present a clear picture of what is missing, and therefore, it might be difﬁcult to see where progress could be

made. In its current form, the literature needed a clear and systematic review of the accumulated work, such as

the one we have provided, which clearly groups the ﬁndings into the various types of incivility investigated in

the literature. To facilitate further accumulation of knowledge on experienced, witnessed, and instigated workplace

Figure 4. Antecedents to and outcomes of instigated incivility

S80 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

incivility as inherently separate but conceptually highly interconnected research domains, this narrative review pre-

sented an overview of the empirical studies that have been published so far.

Suggestions for Future Research

Not only does this paper provide a comprehensive overview of “what we know,”it also reveals several gaps in the

literature that could be addressed in order to further develop the research on workplace incivility in meaningful ways.

Theoretical frameworks

The organization of the incivility literature in this current paper should be instrumental in developing a uniﬁed theoret-

ical framework that would interconnect experienced, witnessed, and instigated workplace incivility and guide future re-

search. We believe that three theoretical perspectives may be good candidates for such a uniﬁed theory. One obvious

option would be to reconsider the social interactionist perspective in which the concept of incivility was originally

positioned (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). This perspective seems to align with trait activation theory (Tett & Guterman,

2000; Tett & Burnett, 2003), which proposes that the interactions between individuals’personality traits and trait-

relevant situational cues at the task level, interpersonal level, and team or organizational level could explain their reac-

tions to events and subsequent behaviors. Trait activation theory could be applied to targets, witnesses, and instigators of

uncivil behaviors and may thus be able to not only guide but also interconnect research on these types of incivility.

Another theoretical perspective that may be fruitful and may further incivility research is the transactional model of

stress (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). According to this theory, appraisals of stressful work ex-

periences as challenges or as threats lead to positive or negative affective experiences, respectively, which in turn inﬂu-

ence how individuals cope with those challenges and threats (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). So far, researchers have used

this theory as a framework to understand and examine how employees appraise uncivil incidents (e.g., Bunk & Magley,

2013), how targets cope with uncivil treatment (e.g., Cortina & Magley, 2009), and target outcomes of stressful incivil-

ity experiences (Cortina et al., 2001). Given that indeed, the uncivil work encounters employees experience or witness

may be appraised as stressful events and that work experiences that employees appraise as stressful may, through neg-

ative affect and cognitions, result in instigated workplace incivility, we believe that the transactional model of stress may

also be helpful in guiding and interconnecting research on the three types of workplace incivility.

A third theory that may help incivility research forward is the affective events theory (AET; Weiss & Cropanzano,

1996), which focuses on affective reactions to events that happen in the workplace. According to this theory, events

that happen in the workplace incite, depending on employees’individual characteristics, affective reactions that in

turn elicit speciﬁc attitudes and behaviors. Indeed, AET has been used to explain the effects of experienced incivility

on targets’health and turnover intentions, albeit not via affective states but via the affective process of satisfaction

with various aspects on one’s work (Lim et al., 2008). Bunk & Magley (2013) link experienced incivility with

emotions and in turn with emotionality, which in turn predicted reciprocation of the behavior toward the perpetrator.

Although this study did not identify which speciﬁc emotions drive the reciprocation, these ﬁndings begin to show

that emotional states may interconnect experienced and instigated incivility. AET might also be applicable to

witnessing incivility and could thus guide and interconnect future research within the three realms of incivility.

Incivility in social settings

Workplace incivility takes place in a social setting, and it is thus highly likely that uncivil incidents are witnessed by

others. Actually, given that incivility usually targets a speciﬁc employee, it is highly likely that the number of

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S81

DOI: 10.1002/job

employees who witness uncivil incidents exceeds the number of employees who experience these incidents. Hence,

one area of future research that could provide opportunities to contribute to our knowledge of the consequences of

workplace incivility is the area of witnessed incivility. Research on this type of workplace incivility is especially

important because the few studies that investigated it have shown that witnessing uncivil incidents incites negative

mood (Porath & Erez, 2009; Totterdell, et al., 2012), has a negative impact on performance-related criteria (Porath

and Erez, 2009), and results in work withdrawal (Miner-Rubino & Cortina, 2004) and emotional exhaustion

(Totterdell et al., 2012).

Related to the preceding discussion, the literature on workplace incivility does not address experienced,

witnessed, or instigated incivility in team settings. However, research has indicated that it may be important to

include the team setting in future research on workplace incivility, because group-level incivility positively relates

to group members’turnover intentions, and burnout, and negatively relates to group members’job satisfaction

(Miner-Rubino & Reed, 2010). It would be a meaningful contribution to the literature to examine if incivility

may become a team-level construct or how incivility might inﬂuence team-level constructs such as team viability,

psychological safety climate, and team mental models. It would also be interesting to investigate whether one uncivil

team member is able to inﬂuence an entire team and whether certain team member characteristics or behaviors could

buffer against the negative effects of a team member’s uncivil conduct.

Another situational attribute that warrants research attention is how organizational climate might inﬂuence the

prevalence and impact of workplace incivility. When introducing the construct of workplace incivility, Andersson

and Pearson (1999) explained its pervasiveness by the rise of a “climate of informality”in organizations. They ar-

gued that because of changes in the labor market, such as increased diversity, downsizing, increased productivity

norms, and budget cuts, organizational hierarchies became ﬂatter, and employees started to behave in more informal

ways, because ﬂatter organizations provide fewer obvious cues regarding civil interpersonal conduct. Future work

may beneﬁt from the development of a valid “climate of informality”measure to test whether cultural informality

might spur incivility and yet in turn attenuate the harm of experienced or witnessed incivility in environments where

such conduct is more normative. Future research could also address how various organizational climate characteris-

tics might spur or buffer against the effects of workplace incivility.

Recently, empirical studies have started to investigate the impact of workplace incivility on social ties beyond the

work domain. These studies showed that experiencing incivility increases employees’work-to-family conﬂict

(Ferguson, 2012; Lim & Lee, 2011), which in turn decreases marital satisfaction in both employees and their

partners (Ferguson, 2012). The ﬁndings that experienced workplace incivility even inﬂuences the attitudes of both

targets of incivility and their partners in the “home”domain suggest that it would be fruitful to examine a broader

range of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that targets of uncivil incidents and their partners may experience and

engage in during their off-work time.

Antecedents and mediators of workplace incivility

Given the high prevalence and high costs of workplace incivility, it is surprising that many more papers investigate the

outcomes of workplace incivility rather than its antecedents. We believe it is important to extend the line of research on

antecedents in order to accumulate knowledge and develop policies and interventions to diminish the prevalence of

workplace incivility. Such research projects may focus on attempts to dissuade instigators’uncivil actions, focus on

ways employees may prevent becoming potential targets, or investigate broader contextual inﬂuences such as organiza-

tional culture and climate variables that may reduce the prevalence of workplace incivility overall. Moreover, very little

work explains why certain antecedent constructs would lead to incivility. Only work by Milam et al (2009) investigated

the mediating mechanism for why certain dispositional personality characteristics would result in higher levels of expe-

rienced incivility; these authors found that disagreeable and neurotic coworkers made them more provocative targets.

In addition, given the strong negative effects of incivility, future research may beneﬁt from attempts to reveal the

reasons for why it has such strong reactions on witnesses. The only research that investigated mediators for the

S82 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

negative effects of witnessed incivility on outcomes has conveyed that negative affective reactions in witnesses

explained the effect of incivility on task and creative performance (Porath & Erez, 2009) and emotional exhaustion

(Totterdell, et al, 2012). Thus, future research may beneﬁt from investigating whether possible cognitive or behav-

ioral reactions of witnesses may explain the adverse effects on witnesses of incivility. Moreover, perhaps more

nuanced emotions, such as the target-directed emotion of empathy or instigator-directed emotion of anger, may also

be implicated in acts of witnessing incivility directed at others and explain some of the adverse effects.

Immediate effects of workplace incivility

We also see a lot of promise for further uncovering the in-the-moment or short-range effects of experiencing,

witnessing, and instigating workplace incivility. Hence, we encourage researchers to design experimental studies

and experience-sampling methodologies to capture these shorter-term affective, cognitive, and behavioral effects.

So far, most research has used retrospective questionnaires to examine consequences of experienced and witnessed

incivility. However, retrospective methods heavily rely on respondents’ability to accurately remember and project

events that happened in the past and “People will often judge what plausibly might be true rather than try to retrieve

exact facts”(Anderson, 1995, p. 215). Hence, studies that use retrospective measures are also prone to respondents’

biases and implicit theories. Experimental studies are less likely to be inﬂuenced by participants’biases and implicit

theories. Moreover, they allow testing for causal relationships, which may be very helpful in investigating theoret-

ical models on experienced, witnessed, and instigated workplace incivility that, hopefully, will be developed in the

near future.

Physiological antecedents and outcomes of incivility

As noted by one of our anonymous reviewers, work on biological and physiological antecedents for instigated inci-

vility and outcomes for experienced and witnessed incivility are largely absent from work on this topic. Generational

differences were linked to reports of experienced incivility (Leiter, et al., 2010), as were adiposity (Sliter et al., 2012)

and the demographic characteristics of age (Lim & Lee, 2011), gender, and race (Cortina et al., 2013), yet other

biological antecedents have remained unexplored. Especially when considering instigated incivility, physiological

antecedents such as diminished sleep, higher blood pressure, or cortisol levels might contribute to enacting uncivil

conduct. Such ﬁndings would expand our understanding of the role of health and physiology on organizational

behaviors. In a similar vein, experienced and witnessed uncivil encounters may cause stress-related physiological

reactions and symptoms, providing further evidence of the immediate and short-term harm incivility may cause.

Understanding the short-range physiological impacts may persuade organizations to implement policies, interventions,

or training programs aimed at reducing the occurrence of incivility in their workplaces before longer-term organiza-

tional productivity and employees’health are impacted. Thus, a focus on biological or physiological antecedents and

outcomes might be a promising avenue for future research.

The role of attributions in the appraisal of uncivil incidents

How individuals react to outcomes of events is likely to depend on their attributions regarding the causes of these

events (e.g., Martinko, Harvey, & Dasborough, 2011). Victims’emotional and behavioral reactions to workplace

incivility might thus depend on what they believe caused their uncivil treatment (e.g., Porath & Erez, 2007). Hence,

one ﬁnal suggestion for future research is to examine the role of attributions of uncivil workplace behaviors. The

relevance of attributions for people’s perceptions of and reactions to negative workplace behaviors is indirectly

supported by a recent meta-analysis (Hershcovis & Barling, 2010), which suggests that attributions for negative

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S83

DOI: 10.1002/job

workplace behaviors may drive the magnitude of the harm they cause. Research about attributions related to incivil-

ity has remained largely unstudied, and such research would make important contributions to understanding why

incivility differentially affects its targets.

Similarities and differences among various forms of interpersonal misbehavior

Hershcovis (2011) recently argued that various forms of workplace aggression (i.e., abusive supervision, bullying,

incivility, interpersonal conﬂict, and social undermining) seem to predict many of the same outcomes in similar mag-

nitudes. She speculated that research on these conceptually distinct concepts may have led to similar research ﬁndings

because the way in which researchers usually operationalize and measure these conceptualizations of workplace

aggression may obscure how they may affect targets’experiences and outcomes in different ways. Speciﬁcally,

Hershcovis (2011) noted that extant research on the various forms of workplace aggression failed to measure those

criteria that differentiate the distinct forms of mistreatment from one another. As a consequence, potential differences

in antecedents and outcomes of different forms of workplace aggression have yet to be established. Investigating why

employees engage in uncivil behavior or when incivility results in unique outcomes would make a strong contribution

not only to the literature on workplace incivility but also to the broader ﬁeld of workplace aggression. Therefore, we

recommend future work that focuses on antecedents, processes, and outcomes that would theoretically and distinctly

relate to the deﬁning characteristics of workplace incivility: low intensity and ambiguous intent. Such future research

endeavors should apply the “precise deﬁnition”approach (O’Leary-Kelly, Duffy & Grifﬁn, 2000), which advocates

the more precise study of a construct or behavior and thus allows for more exact theory building and theory testing.

Summary and Conclusion

Incivility is a costly and pervasive workplace behavior that has important negative affective, cognitive, and behav-

ioral consequences for its targets, witnesses, and instigators. Moreover, it has been noted as a modern way in which

racism and sexism may manifest itself in organizations (Cortina, 2008). It is therefore important to continue research

efforts that attempt to further our understanding of workplace incivility and may help curtail this harmful behavior in

its various forms. Given the negative consequences and high prevalence of workplace incivility, we hope this review

article will inspire scholars to further investigate this harmful workplace phenomenon and will assist and encourage

practitioners to develop policies and measures to reduce the occurrence and impact of experienced, witnessed, and

instigated workplace incivility.

In this narrative review article, we summarized and integrated the research on workplace incivility, an area of research

that attracts increasing amounts of interest from scholars in the ﬁeld of organizational behavior. We tried to create an

organized overview of a research ﬁeld that at present is fragmented and may, therefore, have been less accessible.

We hope that this review of the workplace incivility literature provides directions for future, theoretically driven

research on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of experienced, witnessed, and instigated workplace incivility.

Author biographies

Pauline Schilpzand is an Assistant Professor in the College of Business, Department of Management at Oregon State

University. Her research interests include interpersonal processes, workplace courage, and workplace incivility.

S84 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

Irene de Pater is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore Business School, Department of

Management and Organization. Her research interests include job challenge, the aging workforce, gender at work,

and workplace incivility.

Amir Erez is a Full Professor and a Huber Hurst Fellow at the College of Business Administration at the University

of Florida. His research interests include workplace incivility, dispositions and emotions, and research methods in

organizational studies.

References

Adams, G. A., & Webster, J. R. (2013). Emotional regulation as a mediator between interpersonal mistreatment and distress.

European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology,22, 697–710.

Anderson, J. R. (1995). Cognitive psychology and its implications (4th ed.). New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Andersson, L. M.,&Pearson, C. M. (1999).Tit for tat? The spiraling effect of incivility in the workplace. Academy of Management

Review,24, 452–471.

Barker Caza, B., & Cortina, L. M. (2007). From insult to injury: Explaining the impact of incivility. Basic and Applied Social

Psychology,29(4), 335–350.

Blau, G. (2007). Partially testing a process model for understanding victim responses to an anticipated worksite closure. Journal

of Vocational Behavior,71, 401–428.

Blau, G., Andersson, L. (2005). Testing a measure of instigated workplace incivility. Journal of Occupational & Organizational

Psychology,78(4), 595–614.

Bowling, N. A., & Beehr, T. A. (2006). Workplace harassment from the victim’s perspective: A theoretical model and meta-

analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology,9, 998–1012.

Bunk, J. A., Magley, V. J. (2013). The role of appraisals and emotions in understanding experiences of workplace incivility. Journal

of Occupational Health Psychology,18,87–105.

Burnﬁeld, J. L., Clark, O. L., Devendorf, S. A., & Jex, S. M. (2004). Understanding workplace incivility: Scale development and

validation. In 19th Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Chicago, IL.

Cameron, A. F., & Webster, J. (2011). Relational outcomes of multicommunicating: Integrating incivility and social exchange

perspectives. Organization Science,22, 754–771.

Chen, Y., Ferris, D. L., Kwan, H. K., Yan, M., Zhou, M., & Hong, Y. (2013). Self-love’s lost labor: A self-enhancement model of

workplace incivility. Academy of Management Journal,56, 1199–1219.

Chiaburu, D. S., & Harrison, D. A. (2008). Do peers make the place? Conceptual synthesis and meta-analysis of coworker effects

on perceptions, attitudes, OCBs, and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology,93, 1082–1103.

Cortina, L. M. (2008). Unseen injustice: Incivility as modern discrimination in organizations. Academy of Management Review,

33,55–75.

Cortina, L. M., Kabat-Farr, D., Leskinen, E. A., Huerta, M., & Magley, V. J. (2013). Selective incivility as modern discrimination

in organizations evidence and impact. Journal of Management,39, 1579–1605.

Cortina, L. M., Lonsway, K. A., Magley, V. J., Freeman, L. V., Collinsworth, L. L., Hunter, M., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (2002).

What’s gender got to do with it? Incivility in the federal courts. Law & Social Inquiry,27(2), 235–270.

Cortina, L. M., & Magley, V. J. (2009). Patterns and proﬁles of response to incivility in the workplace. Journal of Occupational

Health Psychology,14, 272–288.

Cortina, L.M., Magley, V. J., Williams,J. H., &Langhout, R. D. (2001). Incivility in the workplace: Incidence and impact. Journal of

Occupational Health Psychology,6,64–80.

Cronbach, L. J. (1960). Essentials of psychological testing. New York: Harper & Row.

Cronbach, L. J., & Meehl, P. E. (1955). Construct validity in psychological tests. Psychological Bulletin,52, 281–302.

Dalal, R. S. (2005). A meta-analysis of the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work

behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology,90, 1241–1255.

Diefendorff, J. M., & Croyle, M. H. (2008). Antecedents of emotional display rule commitment. Human Performance,21,310–332.

Ferguson, M. (2012). You cannot leave it at the ofﬁce: Spillover and crossover of coworker incivility. Journal of Organizational

Behavior,33, 571–588.

Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. S. (1985). If it changes it must be a process: Study of emotion and coping during three stages of a

college examination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,48, 150–170.

Giumetti, G. W., Hatﬁeld, A. L., Scisco, J. L., Schroeder, A. N., Muth, E. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (2013). What a rude e-mail!

Examining the differential effects of incivility versus support on mood, energy, engagement, and performance in an online

context. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,18, 297–309.

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S85

DOI: 10.1002/job

Grifﬁn, B. (2010). Multilevel relationships between organizational-level incivility, justice and intention to stay. Work & Stress,

24, 309–323.

Harrell, S. P. (1994). The racism and life experience scales. Unpublished manuscript.

Hershcovis, M. S. (2011). Incivility, social undermining, bullying…Oh my! A call to reconcile constructs within workplace

aggression research. Journal of Organizational Behavior,32, 499–519.

Hershcovis, M. S., & Barling, J. (2010). Towards a multi-foci approach to workplace aggression: A meta-analytic review of

outcomes from different perpetrators. Journal of Organizational Behavior,31(1), 24–44.

Igou, E. R., Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (2002). Making sense of standardized survey questions: The inﬂuence of reference periods

and their repetition. Communication Monographs,69(2), 179–187.

Isen, A. M., & Erez, A. (2007). Some measurement issues in the study of affect. In A. D. Ong & M. H. M. van Dulman (Eds.).

Oxford handbook of methods in positive psychology (pp. 250–265).New York: Oxford Press.

Kern, J. H., & Grandey, A. A. (2009). Customer incivility as a social stressor: The role of race and racial identity for service

employees. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,14,46–57.

Kim, T.-Y., & Shapiro, D. (2008). Revenge against supervisor mistreatment: Negative emotion, group membership, and cross-

cultural difference. International Journal of Conﬂict Management,19, 339–358.

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, 179–195.

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. New York: Springer.

Leiter, M. P., Laschinger, H. K., Day, A., & Oore, D. G. (2011). The impact of civility interventions on employee social behavior,

distress and attitudes. Journal of Applied Psychology,96, 1258–1274.

Leiter, M. P., Day, A., Oore, D. G., & Laschinger, H. K. S. (2012). Getting better and staying better: Assessing civility,

incivility, distress, and job attitudes one year after a civility intervention. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,

17, 425–434.

Leiter, M. P., Price, S. L., & Spence Laschinger, H. K. (2010). Generational differences in distress, attitudes and incivility among

nurses. Journal of Nursing Management,18(8), 970–980.

Leymann, H. (1990). Mobbing and psychological terror at workplaces. Violence and Victims,5(2), 119–126.

Lim, S., & Cortina, L. M. (2005). Interpersonal mistreatment in the workplace: The interface and impact of general incivility and

sexual harassment. Journal of Applied Psychology,90, 483–496.

Lim, S., Cortina L. M., & Magley, V. J. (2008). Personal and workgroup incivility: Impact on work and health outcomes. Journal

of Applied Psychology,93,95–107.

Lim, S., & Lee, A. (2011). Work and nonwork outcomes of workplace incivility: Does family support help? Journal of Occupa-

tional Health Psychology,16,95–111.

Lim, V. K., & Teo, T. S. (2009). Mind your e-manners: Impact of cyber incivility on employees’work attitude and behavior.

Information & Management,46, 419–425.

Martin, R., Hine, D. (2005). Development and validation of the Uncivil Workplace Behaviour Questionnaire. Journal of Occu-

pational Health Psychology,10, 477–490.

Martinko, M. J., Harvey, P., & Dasborough, M. T. (2011). Attribution theory in the organizational sciences: A case of unrealized

potential. Journal of Organizational Behavior,32(1), 144–149.

Meier, L. L., & Spector, P. (2013). Reciprocal effects of work stressors and counterproductive work behavior: A ﬁve-wave

longitudinal study. Journal of Applied Psychology,98, 529–539.

Milam, A. C., Spitzmueller, C., & Penney, L. M. (2009). Investigating individual differences among targets of workplace

incivility. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,14,58–69.

Meier, L. L., & Semmer, N. K. (2013). Lack of reciprocity, narcissism, anger, and instigated workplace incivility: A moderated

mediation model. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology,22, 461–475.

Miner, K. N., Settles, I. H., Pratt-Hyatt, J. S., & Brady, C. C. (2012). Experiencing incivility in organizations: The buffering

effects of emotional and organizational support. Journal of Applied Social Psychology,42(2), 340–372.

Miner-Rubino, K., & Cortina, L. M. (2004). Working in a context of hostility toward women: Implications for employees’well-

being. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,9, 107–122.

Miner-Rubino, K., & Reed, W. D. (2010). Testing a moderated mediational model of workgroup incivility: The roles of

organizational trust and group regard. Journal of Applied Social Psychology,40(12), 3148–3168.

Mitchell, T. R., & James, L. R. (2001). Building better theory: Time and the speciﬁcation of when things happen. Academy of

Management Review,26, 530–547.

Montgomery, K., Kane, K., & Vance, C. M. (2004). Accounting for differences in norms of respect a study of assessments of

incivility through the lenses of race and gender. Group & Organization Management,29, 248–268.

Neuman, J. H., & Keashly, L. (2002). Workplace Aggression Research Questionnaire (WAR-Q). Unpublished manuscript.

O’Leary-Kelly, A. M., Duffy, M. K., & Grifﬁn, R. W. (2000). Construct confusion in the study of antisocial work behavior.

Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management,18, 275–304.

S86 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

Oore, G. D., Leblanc, D., Day, A., Leiter, M. P., Spence Laschinger, H. K., Price, S. L., & Latimer, M. (2010). When respect

deteriorates: Incivility as a moderator of the stressor–strain relationship among hospital workers. Journal of Nursing Manage-

ment,18(8), 878–888.

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. Journal of Applied Behav-

ioral Science,45(3), 384–410.

Penney, L. M., & Spector, P. E. (2005). Job stress, incivility, and counterproductive work behavior (CWB): The moderating role

of negative affectivity. Journal of Organizational Behavior,26, 777–796.

Porath, C. L., & Erez, A. (2009). Overlooked but not untouched: How rudeness reduces onlookers’performance on routine and

creative tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,109,29–44.

Porath, C. L., & Erez, A. (2007). Does rudeness matter? The effects of rude behavior on task performance and helpfulness. Academy

of Management Journal,50,1181–1197.

Pearson, C., & Porath, C. (2009). The cost of bad behavior: How incivility is damaging your business and what to do about it.

New York: Penguin.

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(S1), E326–E357.

Porath, C. L., & Pearson C. (2013). The price of incivility. Harvard Business Review,91(1–2), 115–121.

Porath, C. L., Overbeck, J. R., & Pearson, C. M. (2008). Picking up the gauntlet: How individuals respond to status challenges.

Journal of Applied Social Psychology,38, 1945–1980.

Rousseau, D. M., Manning, J., & Denyer, D. (2008). Evidence in management and organizational science: Assembling the ﬁeld’s

full weight of scientiﬁc knowledge through syntheses. The Academy of Management Annals,2(1), 475–515.

Sakurai, K., & Jex, S. M. (2012). Coworker incivility and incivility targets’work effort and counterproductive work behaviors:

The moderating role of supervisor social support. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,17, 150–161.

Schaeffer, N. C., & Presser, S. (2003). The science of asking questions. Annual Review of Sociology,29(1), 65–88.

Scott, K. L., Restubog, S. L., & Zagenczyk, T. J. (2013). A social exchange-based model of the antecedents of workplace exclu-

sion. Journal of Applied Psychology,98,37–48.

Sliter, M., Jex, S., Wolford, K., & McInnerney, J. (2010). How rude! Emotional labor as a mediator between customer incivility

and employee outcomes. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,15, 468–481.

Sliter, K. A., Sliter, M. T., Withrow, S. A., & Jex, S. M. (2012a). Employee adiposity and incivility: Establishing a link and iden-

tifying demographic moderators and negative consequences. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,17, 409–424.

Sliter, M., Sliter, K., & Jex, S. (2012b). The employee as a punching bag: The effect of multiple sources of incivility on employee

withdrawal behavior and sales performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior,33, 121–139.

Smith, L., Andrusyszyn, M. A., & Spence Laschinger, H. K. (2010). Effects of workplace incivility and empowerment on newly-

graduated nurses’organizational commitment. Journal of Nursing Management,18(8), 1004–1015.

Spector, P. E., & Jex, S. M. (1998). Development of four self-report measures of job stressors and strain: Interpersonal Conﬂict at

Work Scale, Organizational Constraints Scale, Quantitative Workload Inventory, and Physical Symptoms Inventory. Journal

of Occupational Health Psychology,3, 356–367.

Spence Laschinger, H. K., Leiter, M., Day, A., & Gilin, D. (2009). Workplace empowerment, incivility, and burnout: Impact on

staff nurse recruitment and retention outcomes. Journal of Nursing Management,17(3), 302–311.

Spence Laschinger, H. K. , Leiter, M. P., Day, A., Gilin-Oore, D., & Mackinnon, S. P. (2012). Building empowering work

environments that foster civility and organizational trust: Testing an intervention. Nursing Research,61(5), 316–325.

Taylor, S. G., & Kluemper, D. H. (2012). Linking perceptions of role stress and incivility to workplace aggression: The moder-

ating role of personality. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology,17, 316–329.

Taylor, S. G., Bedeian, A. G., & Kluemper, D. H. (2012.) Linking workplace incivility to citizenship performance: The combined

effects of affective commitment and conscientiousness. Journal of Organizational Behavior,33, 878–893.

Tett, R. P., & Guterman, H. A. (2000). Situation trait relevance, trait expression, and cross-situational consistency: Testing a

principle of trait activation. Journal of Research in Personality,34, 397–423.

Tett, R. P., & Burnett, D. D. (2003). A personality trait-based interactionist model of job performance. Journal of Applied

Psychology,88, 500–517.

Totterdell, P., Hershcovis, S. M., & Niven, K. (2012). Can employees be emotionally drained by witnessing unpleasant interac-

tions between coworkers? A diary study of induced emotion regulation. Work and Stress,26, 112–129.

Trudel, J., & Reio, T. G. (2011). Managing workplace incivility: The role of conﬂict management styles—Antecedent or

antidote? Human Resource Development Quarterly,22(4), 395–423.

Van Jaarsveld, D. D., Walker, D. D., & Skarlicki, D. P. (2010). The role of job demands and emotional exhaustion in the

relationship between customer and employee incivility. Journal of Management,36, 1486–1504.

Walsh, B. M., Magley, V. J., Reeves, D. W., Davies-Schrils, K. A., Marmet, M. D., & Gallus, J. A. (2012). Assessing workgroup

norms for civility: The developmentof the Civility Norms Questionnaire-Brief. Journal of Business and Psychology,27,407–420.

WORKPLACE INCIVILITY S87

DOI: 10.1002/job

Weiss, H. M., & Cropanzano, R. (1996). Affective events theory: A theoretical discussion of the structure, causes and conse-

quences of affective experiences at work. In B. M. Staw & L. L. Cummings (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior:

An annual series of analytical essays and critical reviews (pp. 1–74). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Winkielman, P., Knäuper, B., & Schwarz, N. (1998). Looking back at anger: Reference periods change the interpretation of

emotion frequency questions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,75(3), 719–728.

Wilson, N. L., & Holmvall, C. M. (2013). The development and validation of the Incivility from Customers Scale. Journal of

Occupational Health Psychology,18, 310–326.

Wu, L., Zhang, H., Chiu, R. K., & He, X. (2013). Hostile attribution bias and negative reciprocity beliefs exacerbate incivility’s

effects on interpersonal deviance. Journal of Business Ethics,120,1–14.

S88 P. SCHILPZAND ET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job

Enhancing customer civility: Integrating civility climate behaviors and self-service technology

Article

Nov 2024

Workplace incivility: A review of the literature and agenda for future research

Abstract and Figures