![]() Confrontation can make the dynamic worse. Avoidance often falls apart, because sometimes you have no choice but to collaborate with discourteous colleagues. Although these approaches can help in certain situations, I don’t usually advise people to take them. Another common response is to try to work around the problem by avoiding the perpetrator as much as possible. Many people decide to tackle incivility head-on-through either retaliation or direct discussion. I wish I could have shared these with my younger self as she floundered in a hostile work environment many years ago. My research has uncovered some tactics that anyone can use to minimize the effects of rudeness on performance and well-being. So when individuals encounter incivility, what should they do? But very few organizations can comprehensively enforce this rule. Perhaps as a result, the most effective way to reduce the costs of incivility in the workplace is to build a culture that rejects it-to adopt “the no asshole rule,” as Robert Sutton calls it in his best-selling book by that name. Research has shown that responses to threat, humiliation, loss, or defeat-all commonly associated with incivility-are significantly influenced by genetic makeup. Unfortunately, people’s resilience to incivility is partly out of their control. It has been shown to damage the immune system, put a strain on families, and produce other deleterious effects. Seeing or experiencing rude behavior impairs working (short-term) memory and thus cognitive ability. In laboratory settings I’ve found that simply observing it makes people far less likely to absorb information. Rude behavior ranged from outright nastiness and intentional undermining to ignoring people’s opinions to checking e-mail during meetings.Īs I and my colleagues at the sports academy discovered, incivility in the workplace drags down performance and takes a personal toll. In 2011 half said they were treated badly at least once a week-up from a quarter in 1998. Over the past 20 years I’ve polled thousands of workers and found that 98% have experienced uncivil behavior and 99% have witnessed it. My research has shown that it is almost impossible to be untouched by incivility during one’s career. That experience was so formative that I decided to spend my professional life studying workplace incivility-and its costs and remedies. By the time I left, many of us were husks of our former selves. Employees were at best disengaged at worst they undertook acts of sabotage or released their frustration on family members and friends. We had fallen victim to a work culture rife with bullying, rudeness, and other incivility that was set by a dictatorial head of the organization and had trickled down through the ranks. But within two years I and many of my peers had left our jobs. I moved from the snowy Midwest to sunny Florida with a group of fellow former college athletes to help a global athletic brand launch a sports academy. When I was 22, I scored what I thought was my dream job. She suggests a two-pronged approach: Take steps to thrive cognitively, which includes growth, momentum, and continual learning and take steps to thrive affectively, which means experiencing passion, excitement, and vitality at work. ![]() The most effective remedy, she says, is to work holistically on your well-being, rather than trying to change the perpetrator or the relationship. Porath has identified some tactics to minimize the effects of rudeness on performance and health. ![]() Observing or experiencing rude behavior impairs short-term memory and thus cognitive ability, and has been shown to damage the immune system, put a strain on families, and produce other deleterious effects. Rude behavior ranged from outright nastiness and undermining to ignoring people’s opinions to checking e-mail during meetings. In 2011 half said they were treated rudely at least once a week-up from a quarter in 1998. Over the past 20 years she has polled thousands of workers: 98% have experienced uncivil behavior, and 99% have witnessed it. “It is almost impossible to progress through a career untouched by incivility,” the author writes. ![]()
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