What Were They Thinking? A Meaning-Making Model of Workplace Incivility from the Target's Perspective.

Workplace Incivility;Cognitive Appraisal;Attribution;Interpersonal Mistreatment;Occupational Well-being;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Marchiondo, Lisa A.Lee, Fiona ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Workplace Incivility;    Cognitive Appraisal;    Attribution;    Interpersonal Mistreatment;    Occupational Well-being;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/93825/lmarchi_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

I introduce the Meaning-Making Model of Incivility (MMI), which applies fundamental social, organizational, and cognitive psychological theories to illuminate the process through which incivility – a low-level form of interpersonal mistreatment with ambiguous intent to harm – is able to undermine employees.Studies demonstrating workplace incivility’s negative implications for employee well-being are replete, but it is not clear how a low-intensity form of deviance can significantly harm employees.I propose that concepts from the stress and coping literature, particularly cognitive appraisal, explain how these low-intensity social interactions affect targets’ well-being.Using two surveys of working adults, I demonstrate that targets form harm and even challenge (i.e., learning opportunity) appraisals of their uncivil experiences.Targets’ perceptions of their perpetrators’ goals (rooted in attribution theory) predict cognitive appraisal, making them integral to this meaning-making process.In Study 1, data from a sample of women (n= 419) employed across diverse occupations confirms my hypothesis that the more incivility targets appraise their experiences as harmful, the worse their occupational outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction).Further, targets form more severe harm appraisals when they believe their perpetrators wielded intent and control in behaving uncivilly.Study 2, consisting of a U.S. sample of men and women (n= 479) across occupations, confirms the findings from Study 1 and expands them by examining whether targets ever form challenge (i.e., learning, growth) appraisals of uncivil encounters.Consistent with the posttraumatic growth literature, Study 2 results support my hypothesis that they do.Incivility targets who adopt challenge appraisals experience improvements in their organizational outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, thriving at work).Further, targets are more likely to appraise incivility as challenging when they perceive their perpetrators’ behavior as unintentional.I supplement this empirical work with a theoretically-oriented discussion of additional constructs that may play significant roles in the model: target individual differences, macro-level outcomes, and regional and organizational contexts.My theoretical propositions and empirical findings advance our understanding of workplace incivility’s impact by incorporating fundamental psychosocial theories to illuminate targets’ meaning-making of this insidious form of mistreatment.