The influence of sex on incivility in work-related email communication

Abstract

Incivility is low intensity, discourteous behaviour with ambiguous intentions to harm the target that is in violation of the workplace norms of respect (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). Incivility is a common organizational problem that has been linked to negative organizational and personal outcomes (Johnson & Indvik, 2001; Pearson et al., 2001). Using an experimental design, I investigated the influence of sex of the instigator and of the target participant in perceiving and responding to email incivility in a simulated workplace setting. Both participants and independent raters assessed the participants' . responses on measures of incivility. I expected female participants would perceive more incivility in the uncivil stimulus emails than would male participants. I also expected participants would perceive more incivility in the uncivil email from a female sender than a male sender. I expected males to reciprocate more incivility than females, particularly when responding to females. The hypotheses pertaining to participant and sender sex were largely unsupported. Furthermore, unexpectedly, due to lack of agreement raters' assessments had to be treated separately for the analyses, which limited the interpretation of the findings on participants' perpetration of incivility. The results and limitations of the current study are discussed in terms of how to proceed with further investigations of the current variables of interest. Additionally, implications and potential directions for future research are discussed.