Discussion Board Reply, Peers Response

The scenario of incivility in the workplace is one that the vast majority of Americans are familiar with; a whopping 98% of poll participants interviewed stated that they had experienced rudeness in the workplace, and in 2011 half of participants indicated that they were treated rudely every week. (Porath, Pearson, 2013) With these statistics, one cannot question whether there are toxic encounters in the work environment; but is it increasing?

Data collected from the National Opinion Research Center between 2002 and 2018, where the participants answered “I am treated with respect at work” indicated that yes, there is a slight increase in perceived rudeness. Still, given the 16-year span of the poll, this number seems insignificant (2020). For example, recent data showed that the amount of participants whose selected response was that they “disagree” with the poll numbered 72 in 2010 and 101 in 2018. However, one must question whether this increase means that the workforce as a whole has become more rude and uncivil to employees.

The fact that people are having more uncivil experiences in the workplace over the past few years cannot be chalked up to wholesale toxicity by the workforce when a lot of these experiences can be perpetuated by only a few members of a company. In Galatians 5:9, Paul says this: “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump” (King James Version), meaning that a few bad coworkers can sour the entire work environment. In 2018, a study was conducted to observe how common workplace rudeness was with reference to their relationships to coworkers as individuals, not as a whole; a reported 69% of employees felt they had experienced incivility in the workplace, yet these incivilities only occurred with 16% of their coworkers. (Taylor, Kluemper, Locklear, 2018) Meaning that while yes, hostility is experienced by a majority of employees, that does not mean that a majority or even a large percentage of employees are taking part in this rude behavior.

It is unfortunate that rude and uncivil behavior is frequently exercised in the workplace, even if by a minority of hostile entities; however, it is not well-grounded to state that Americans are becoming ruder as a whole in the workplace environment; the data supports only that the small amount of perpetrators are becoming more uncivil as this behavior is allowed to go unchecked in the workplace.

References:

National Opinion Research Center. (2020). GSS Data Explorer: I am treated with respect at work. Retrieved September 07, 2020, from https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/2782/vshow

Porath, C., & Pearson, C. (2019, March 19). The Price of Incivility. Retrieved September 07, 2020, from https://hbr.org/2013/01/the-price-of-incivility

Taylor, S. G., Kluemper, D. H., & Locklear, L. R. (2018). Is incivility really tit-for-tat? Experienced and instigated incivility in dyadic relationships. Academy of Management Proceedings. doi:10.5465/ambpp.2018.10553abstract