Workplace incivility: Insidious, pervasive and harmful

Workplace incivility is the term used to describe workplace behaviour that is rude, disruptive, and disrespectful and that promotes discord and disharmony (Anderson et al., 2022; Clark et al., 2020, Wilson et al., 2023). It differs from other deviant workplace behaviour, such as bullying and harassment. Workplace bullying refers to a persistent, targeted, deliberate pattern of behaviour that occurs over time and is intended to demean, humiliate or intimidate a target (Arnetz et al., 2019). Workplace harassment most often refers to unwelcome conduct related to characteristics such as gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, disability or other protected characteristics (Gov. UK, 2024) that is designed to create a hostile work environment.

Workplace incivility can include a range of negative interpersonal behaviours such as dismissiveness, aggression, condescension, exclusion, rudeness, blaming, accusing, sabotaging, unhelpfulness, micromanagement, disregarding personal boundaries and undermining (Clark et al., 2020; Wilson et al., 2023).

Incivility is pervasive in nursing, across a range of contexts and situations. High levels of experience of workplace incivility have been widely reported across the profession—in students of nursing, newly graduated nurses, clinical nurses and nurse academics (e.g., see Blackstock et al., 2022; Clark et al., 2020; Green, 2019; Singh et al., 2020, 2022; Wilson et al., 2023). Because workplace incivility can be enacted with subtlety, it may be viewed as less severe than other forms of workplace deviance. Still, over time, the effects can be significant to people and to organisations, affecting the well-being of individuals and organisational function, including increased staff absenteeism, attrition and recruitment issues.

Behaviours associated with workplace incivility can and do create hostile work environments in which people can experience anxiety, frustration and powerlessness (Singh et al., 2022) and are associated with negative employee outcomes (Zhai et al., 2023). Workplace incivility can also negatively affect job satisfaction, confidence, self-esteem, personal sense of worth and value in the workplace, and people experiencing incivility may feel undervalued, disrespected and disillusioned (Singh et al., 2022). Relationships are damaged through the loss of trust that accompanies workplace incivility (Wilson et al., 2023), and this can affect the quality of professional relationships, leading to fragmented, fractured teams and causing loneliness and isolation in the workplace. Frequent exposure to incivility in the work environment (including interprofessional incivility) can be very stressful and contribute to toxic leadership and work cultures that perpetuate, normalise and enable the continuation of workplace incivility with negative consequences on workforce participation, impacting the quality of care delivery and compromising patient safety and outcomes (Cleary et al., 2023; Lewis, 2023).

People experiencing workplace incivility may be reluctant to engage in work-based social relationships, and this, in turn, can make it more difficult to access support in the workplace when it is needed. Over time, continued workplace incivility could lead to disengagement. Disengagement has been associated with bullying in the workplace (Arnetz et al., 2019) and email incivility (Park & Haun, 2018) and has the potential to reduce the performance of the team. Zhai et al. (2023) found that work engagement is associated with positive attributes such as affective commitment. When nurses feel engaged with their work, they display many positive attributes and experience a sense of achievement and a sense of belonging to their workplace and profession. For departments and organisations to achieve optimal performance, it is necessary to ensure that personnel are optimally engaged in the workplace and willing to exert discretionary effort. Where people are disengaged, the likelihood of discretionary effort is greatly reduced. A workplace affected by incivility can feature decreased productivity, reduced morale and high staff turnover. Stress and distress caused by workplace incivility can also potentially spill into a person's private life, possibly affecting personal relationships and exacerbating stress.

Everyday resources such as email are frequently cited as instruments of workplace incivility (e.g., see Park & Haun, 2018; Wilson et al., 2023), and this is important as many of us send and receive literally hundreds of emails every month. Findings by Park and Haun (2018) highlight the stress and distress that can be caused by email incivility and suggest links between email incivility and work withdrawal and disengagement. Email incivility has also been linked to cyberloafing (Zhou et al., 2022), which is another form of work disengagement.

Examples of email incivility can include sending hostile, dismissive or curt emails, using inappropriate language or tone in emails, and sending emails lacking basic courtesies such as greetings and thank you. Practices such as copying numerous additional parties into emails that could be just between two people, especially when on potentially contentious topics or the email contains sensitive and /or confidential information can be experienced as being designed to intimidate, coerce and silence dissenting voices and opinions, and can also contribute to cultures of incivility. Copying unnecessary people into emails also adds to everyone's email burden. It contributes to people feeling stressed and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emails received, which contributes to a climate of workplace incivility.

Emails can be a particular problem for various reasons. The remote and impersonal features of email mean that people may not take the same care in communication that they may take in face-to-face communications. Email communication is devoid of context, such as tone of voice and cues, such as facial expressions, that are part of communication and an important aspect of civility in the workplace. In face-to-face communication, cues such as warmth of voice and manner, and smiling soften messaging. In emails, these dimensions of communication are missing, which means that an email intended to be impartial and informative could potentially be interpreted as hostile by the recipient, particularly if red or bold font and/or upper case is used, and this can be experienced as workplace incivility. Additionally, the depersonalised nature of email means that people may write what they are not willing to say to another person's face or forward sensitive information without consent; this, however, does not mitigate accountability (Cleary & Freeman, 2005).

The instantaneous nature of email also means that people may respond quickly (or not in a timely fashion) without due concern for wording and tone of communication, increasing the risk that email communications can be experienced as dismissive, short or terse and can also be experienced as hostile, disrespectful or otherwise hurtful. This aspect could be compounded by the cultures of immediacy, where people feel pressured to respond quickly. Email also has the additional feature of being able to be forwarded and stored and provides a permanent record of an interaction. These features may make people more guarded when using email, potentially affecting authentic communications. During the social restrictions imposed by the recent pandemic, many of us moved to a totally online environment for extended periods and Wilson et al. (2023) found that this move led to an increase in perceptions of online communication-related workplace incivility.

Workplace incivility is often associated with systemic (rather than individual) factors. These factors can include high pressure and workload, poor leadership, ineffectual communication, lack of appropriate policies and procedures and poor availability or participation in training and development. Stress, heavy workloads and difficult deadlines can create pressures that can contribute to people behaving aggressively and with incivility towards their colleagues (Blackstock et al., 2022; Clark et al., 2020). This is especially so in poorly resourced environments. Leaders are crucial to organisational culture and can enable and create cultures in which incivility thrives (Blackstock et al., 2022). Unfortunately, leaders often have no culpability for their role in destructive workplace cultures or their uncivil behaviour, and this lack of accountability can contribute to cultures in which incivility becomes normalised into workplace cultures and thrives.

Miscommunication or poor communication channels can lead to misunderstandings that can cause incivility in the workplace (Wilson et al., 2023). Vague or unclear communication policies can contribute to poor communication in the workplace and create ambiguity and uncertainty about what constitutes appropriate behaviour. Lack of engagement in professional development and training opportunities can mean that people are not adequately equipped to effectively deal with work-based communication processes or effectively address workplace incivility where it occurs. Successfully tackling systemic antecedents to workplace civility requires a multi-pronged process of cultural change involving effective leadership, policy reform and team development.

Incivility in the workplace harms us all. We all thrive in healthy, and enabling work environments that uphold professional standards in which civility can flourish. However, these environments do not just happen. They occur in the context of a range of strategies, including effective leadership, appropriate resourcing, strong, fair and equitable policy guidance, effective employee training and development, respect for boundaries, goodwill, and optimal workplace engagement and effort. We all spend much time at work and stand to gain by actively contributing to, supporting and enabling civil workplace cultures to improve health outcomes, scholarship, education and research.