Article

The spiraling effect of incivility enacted through information and communication technology (ICT) in the workplace

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Abstract

Purpose This research provides an empirical test of Andersson and Pearson’s (1999) theoretical incivility spiral. Rather than investigate the incidence of incivility perpetration following incivility victimization in face-to-face interactions, this study tests for evidence of an incivility spiral due to communications enacted through information and communication technology (ICT) based on affective events theory (AET) (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). Further, the moderating impacts of both gender and incivility climate on this relationship are considered. Design/methodology/approach The sample for this Time 1–Time 2 survey-based research was comprised of 354 full-time working adults from a wide range of organizations. We employed hierarchical moderated regression analyses as our primary data analytic technique. Findings Results demonstrate that victims of ICT incivility at Time 1 are likely to be perpetrators of ICT incivility at Time 2. Furthermore, this relationship is stronger for men than it is for women and is exacerbated in cultures that have a low tolerance for ICT incivility. Originality/value This is the first known test of the incidence of an incivility spiral due to communications enacted through ICT. There is special cause for concern given the often-impersonal nature of ICT use (and abuse) in organizations. Individuals may feel emboldened by the distance and perceived safety ICT mediation affords and may be less likely to moderate their online interactions with colleagues. Absent the physical intimacy and non-verbal signals that face-to-face interactions provide, individuals may be more likely to perpetuate incivility in ICT interactions even if there is no implicit intent to harm others.

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Purpose There have been strides in workplace incivility (WI), but in what direction, angles and theoretical streams are they taking place? In light of it, the purpose of this review is to analyze the overall WI research output yielded in the initial decades of this century. Design/methodology/approach This investigation searched exclusively for empirical articles written in English that matched the terms incivility and WI in the websites of prominent peer-review publications covering the period of 19 years (i.e. 2000–2019). As a result, 93 peer-reviewed empirical studies were properly gathered and classified. Findings WI is one of the most relevant topics in OB studies under scrutiny in this moment. Corroborating such a perception is the huge amount of outlets that have been publishing about WI. In this sense, it is a topic that has gained strong interdisciplinary status, given the manifested interest of very distinct areas. Cross-sectional studies have prevailed in terms of method preferences, yet other approaches have been used. Of noteworthy is the shortage of qualitative and meta-analytic studies. Data provided evidence that a very limited number of nations (only 18 countries) have been investigated and it is not exactly surprising that the United States be the target of the majority of studies in this field. The antecedents and consequences of WI are the major focus of the investigations. But I found some evidence that that WI has been tested as performing the role of measure, mediator and moderator. Research limitations/implications It focused exclusively on peer-review journals and articles written in English. Originality/value This endeavor contributes to the theory of WI by encompassing crucial aspects such as time horizon, major outlets, study types, country-level output, samples features, constructs perused, theoretical function of WI and research outcomes. In addition, it points out new potential research streams.
Article
Purpose The emerging literature on computer-mediated communication at the study lacks depth in terms of elucidating the consequences of the effects of incivility on employees. This study aims to compare face-to-face incivility with incivility encountered via e-mail on both task performance and performance evaluation. Design/methodology/approach In two experimental studies, the authors test whether exposure to incivility via e-mail reduces individual task performance beyond that of face-to-face incivility and weather exposure to that incivility results in lower performance evaluations for third-parties. Findings The authors show that being exposed to cyber incivility does decrease performance on a subsequent task. The authors also find that exposure to rudeness, both face-to-face and via e-mail, is contagious and results in lower performance evaluation scores for an uninvolved third party. Originality/value This research comprises an empirically grounded study of incivility in the context of e-mail at study, highlights distinctions between it and face-to-face rudeness and reveals the potential risks that cyber incivility poses for employees.
Article
Affective events theory (AET) suggests that when an employee enacts negative workplace events, such as ICT incivility, the employee is likely to experience a negative mood state, which in turn may have a detrimental effect on attitudes regarding work and family. Using a sample of 260 working individuals, we found that engaging in ICT incivility aggression negatively impacts mood, as evidenced by a negative relationship with positive affect and a positive relationship to psychological distress. Furthermore, in the work domain, the relationship between ICT incivility aggression and job satisfaction was mediated by positive mood, but not by psychological distress. In the family domain, the relationship between incivility and family satisfaction was mediated by psychological distress, but not by mood. These mixed mediation findings may suggest that particular moods are somewhat contextual and made more salient at work versus with family. Practical implications for organizations seeking to discourage ICT incivility aggression, as well as and directions for future research, are discussed.
Article
With the rapid development in mobile computing and Web technologies, online hate speech has been increasingly spread in social network platforms since it's easy to post any opinions. Previous studies confirm that exposure to online hate speech has serious offline consequences to historically deprived communities. Thus, research on automated hate speech detection has attracted much attention. However, the role of social networks in identifying hate-related vulnerable community is not well investigated. Hate speech can affect all population groups, but some are more vulnerable to its impact than others. For example, for ethnic groups whose languages have few computational resources, it is a challenge to automatically collect and process online texts, not to mention automatic hate speech detection on social media. In this paper, we propose a hate speech detection approach to identify hatred against vulnerable minority groups on social media. Firstly, in Spark distributed processing framework, posts are automatically collected and pre-processed, and features are extracted using word n-grams and word embedding techniques such as Word2Vec. Secondly, deep learning algorithms for classification such as Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), a variety of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), are used for hate speech detection. Finally, hate words are clustered with methods such as Word2Vec to predict the potential target ethnic group for hatred. In our experiments, we use Amharic language in Ethiopia as an example. Since there was no publicly available dataset for Amharic texts, we crawled Facebook pages to prepare the corpus. Since data annotation could be biased by culture, we recruit annotators from different cultural backgrounds and achieved better inter-annotator agreement. In our experimental results, feature extraction using word embedding techniques such as Word2Vec performs better in both classical and deep learning-based classification algorithms for hate speech detection, among which GRU achieves the best result. Our proposed approach can successfully identify the Tigre ethnic group as the highly vulnerable community in terms of hatred compared with Amhara and Oromo. As a result, hatred vulnerable group identification is vital to protect them by applying automatic hate speech detection model to remove contents that aggravate psychological harm and physical conflicts. This can also encourage the way towards the development of policies, strategies, and tools to empower and protect vulnerable communities.
Article
Two studies generated profiles of cyberbullying/cyberincivility and traditional bullying/incivility in adults, particularly within the workplace. In Study 1, 20% of 3,699 participants had the majority of cyberbullying victimization and 7.5% had the majority of traditional bullying victimization occur in adulthood, with 30% saying they were bullied at work. Relationships between bullying and negative outcomes were found. Because of the clear evidence of bullying and cyberbullying in the workplace in Study 1, Study 2 addressed the relationship of these constructs to workplace incivility. Workplace face-to-face incivility and bullying were related among 321 participants, as were workplace cyberbullying and cyberincivility. Face-to-face incivility was more common than online incivility, face-to-face bullying, or online bullying, yet all four behaviors were associated with negative outcomes. Differences in intentionality, acceptability, and severity were observed, with workplace face-to-face bullying perceived as the most severe and having the greatest intentionality to harm. These results emphasize the importance of studying bullying among adults, and highlight the conceptual independence of bullying and incivility. Correlates of workplace aggression are discussed using job demands-resources theory.
Article
We examine how the use of mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs) among self-employed homeworkers affects their experience of work, focusing particularly on where work is carried out, how the work/non-work boundary is managed, and people's experiences of social and professional isolation. Positively, their use enhanced people's sense of spatio-temporal freedom by allowing them to leave the home without compromising their work availability. This also helped reduce people's feelings of social isolation. More negatively, their use enhanced people's sense of ‘perpetual contact’, creating a sense that work was difficult to escape from. However, the extent to which mobile ICTs were used, and the extent to which their impact on people's experiences of work were understood, were found to vary significantly, highlighting the agency that users have with regard to technology use. The findings are framed by combining Nippert-Eng's boundary work theory, with an ‘emergent process’ perspective on socio-technical relations.
Article
Given that many employees use email for work communication on a daily basis, this study examined within-person relationships between day-level incivility via work email (cyber incivility) and employee outcomes. Using resource-based theories, the study examined two resources (i.e., job control, psychological detachment from work) that may alleviate the effects of cyber incivility on distress. Daily survey data collected over four consecutive workdays from 96 employees were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling. Results showed that on days when employees experienced cyber incivility, they reported higher affective and physical distress at the end of the workday which, in turn, was associated with higher distress the next morning. Job control attenuated the concurrent relationships between cyber incivility and both types of distress at work, while psychological detachment from work in the evening weakened the lagged relationships between end-of-workday distress and distress the following morning. These findings shed light on cyber incivility as a daily stressor and on the importance of resources both in the work and home domains that can help reduce the incivility-related stress process. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.
Article
Information systems (IS) support in organizations has undergone dramatic changes over the years. IS professionals in the support function have become an important knowledge source to colleagues who seek assistance with their IS usage. Our understanding of IS professionals' customer-oriented behaviours is limited, however. Focusing on IS post-implementation support and drawing upon organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) theory, this paper seeks to understand IS professionals' citizenship behaviours in supporting colleagues. Our analysis of 630 support tasks performed by IS professionals with regard to two systems at three periods reveals five types of customer-oriented OCB: anticipation, education, justification, personalization-technology and personalization-business. Our results also show different associations between four contextual factors of IS support (i.e. system, user, task and problem) and the OCBs. In instances of user deficiency, more personalization-business and anticipation OCBs were observed across all the four problem domains (functionality, data, workflow and role). By contrast, in instances of system deficiency, more personalization-technology OCBs were observed among the two problem domains of data and functionality. Moreover, the occurrence of OCBs revealed a temporal pattern such that personalization-business OCBs are more pronounced in early post-implementation periods whereas anticipation OCBs and personalization-technology OCBs become more dominant later. The categorization scheme of the customer-oriented OCB, the OCB dynamics and the patterns between OCB types and the contextual factors advance our understanding of the evolving and challenging work of organizational IS support. Our findings extend the OCB literature on customer orientation and enrich the limited studies on knowledge-intensive IS support work. Practical implications of the findings on IS management and policies are discussed.
Article
Information systems (IS) support in organizations has undergone dramatic changes over the years. IS professionals in the support function have become an important knowledge source to colleagues who seek assistance with their IS usage. Our understanding of IS professionals' customer-oriented behaviours is limited, however. Focusing on IS post-implementation support and drawing upon organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) theory, this paper seeks to understand IS professionals' citizenship behaviours in supporting colleagues. Our analysis of 630 support tasks performed by IS professionals with regard to two systems at three periods reveals five types of customer-oriented OCB: anticipation, education, justification , personalization-technology and personalization-business. Our results also show different associations between four contextual factors of IS support (i.e. system , user, task and problem) and the OCBs. In instances of user deficiency, more personalization-business and anticipation OCBs were observed across all the four problem domains (functionality, data, workflow and role). By contrast, in instances of system deficiency, more personalization-technology OCBs were observed among the two problem domains of data and functionality. Moreover, the occurrence of OCBs revealed a temporal pattern such that personalization-business OCBs are more pronounced in early post-implementation periods whereas anticipation OCBs and personalization-technology OCBs become more dominant later. The categori-zation scheme of the customer-oriented OCB, the OCB dynamics and the patterns between OCB types and the contextual factors advance our understanding of the evolving and challenging work of organizational IS support. Our findings extend the OCB literature on customer orientation and enrich the limited studies on knowledge-intensive IS support work. Practical implications of the findings on IS management and policies are discussed.
Conference Paper
Organizations increasingly rely on information system (IS) professionals to facilitate end-users' effective use of information technologies. Focusing on IS post-adoptive support and drawing upon organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) theory, this study seeks to understand IS professionals' customer-oriented citizenship behavior, discretionary behavior that would greatly enhance customer service quality in IS support context. Analyzing 300 support service interactions at three points in time and with two applications, we identified five categories of customer-oriented citizenship behavior by IS support personnel, including anticipation, education, justification, personalization-technology and personalization-business. Moreover, different types of OCB were found dominant across three periods, starting with the justification OCB and gradually shifting to anticipation and education OCB. Results from this study demonstrate the value of customer-oriented citizenship behavior in IS context. Our findings contribute to the literature on IS post-adoptive use and provide organizations a useful guideline for enhancing IS service quality.
Article
Student-recruited sampling (SRS), which typically involves students soliciting participants from predetermined populations to assist in data collection, has become an increasingly common and important research design feature. As evidence, many of the top occupational science journals have published studies with SRS as an important research component in recent years. Supportive evidence notwithstanding, SRS has been subjected to considerable consternation – Arguments that often have taken a one-sided, and highly pejorative, tone. Wheeler, Shanine, Leon, and Whitman's (2013, J. Occup. Organ. Psychol.) recent meta-analysis, which compared data from SRS and non-SRS contexts, challenged the legitimacy of these claims. Findings opposed the persistent ‘non-representativeness’ criticism documenting comparable effect sizes for politics perceptions and engagement across designs. In this commentary, I briefly discuss implications of their findings and then offer my opinions regarding the use of SRS as informed by the last decade of personal involvement.
Article
Student‐recruited sampling, a technique involving the use of student recruiters to find participants on behalf of a researcher, has been increasingly used in organizational research; yet there has been little attempt to understand its implications for the conclusions scholars draw from research. In this study, we meta‐analyse studies of engagement and perceptions of politics in order to examine whether student‐recruited sampling leads to samples that differ from other samples and whether those differences result in different observed relationships between variables. We found that student‐recruited samples were not substantively demographically different from non‐student‐recruited samples. Further, we found few differences in the observed correlations of student‐recruited samples compared with non‐student‐recruited samples; the differences found would not lead to different practical conclusions from the findings. We discuss the implications of these results for future studies and provide guidance for researchers, reviewers, and editors regarding the use of student‐recruited samples in organizational research. Practitioner points The type of sample used can lead to over‐ or under‐representation of demographic characteristics with the sample, which has unknown affects on analyses of data. Student‐recruited samples may lead to smaller effect sizes of observed statistical relationships.
Article
The misuse of information and communications technology (ICTs) in the workplace is a growing problem that is expected to continue to trend upward. The consequences of this form of behaviour range from minor outcomes with little impact, to more serious outcomes with significant negative impacts to individuals, groups, and even for entire organizations. Research into technologically mediated counterproductive behaviour has lagged behind the phenomena, remains limited in scope, and is conducted in disciplinary and theoretical isolation. Conceptual clarity and theoretical synthesis are viewed as critical steps for enabling a strong program of research into this new counterproductive domain. This article proposes a potential approach for fostering conceptual clarity and identifies the necessity for a theoretical model to facilitate future investigation.
Article
Obnoxious behaviour has become endemic in the workplace. Some of the worst offences are: not turning off mobile phones in meetings; leaving a jammed printer, gossiping, and snapping at coworkers. Yet, it is this small stuff that relentlessly grinds down collegial working relationships. Incivility is at the low end of the continuum of workplace abuse. Workplace incivility is not violence or harassment or even open conflict, although it can build up to any of those things. Links between the work environment and indicators of employee loyalty, commitment, and productivity show this is not a “fluff” issue. In addition, a recent study on workplace incivility reveals that rude employees and managers can cost a company millions of dollars a year. This paper will look at a definition of incivility in the workplace, the causes of poor behaviour, the costs to organizations, and what employers can do to help.