Interventions to reduce workplace incivility: The what, why and how?

Funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, this study investigates the types of interventions that can effectively address the serious consequences of workplace incivility on employees and their organizations.

Everyone readily agrees that employees have a right to a safe workplace environment. Recent studies on workplace mistreatment, however, suggest that this is far from reality. Dhanani et al. (2021) estimated that as many as 75% of working adults have experienced workplace incivility. Workplace incivility, a subtle form of workplace mistreatment, has serious ramifications on employees and their organizations (Han et al., 2022) and research has demonstrated that it negatively impacts employee outcomes such as engagement, commitment, health, and wellbeing (e.g., Adil et al., 2020) and organizational outcomes such as productivity and retention (Jawhar & Schreurs, 2018). Still, we know little about the types of interventions that can effectively address the serious consequences of workplace incivility on employees and their organizations. Importantly, there is virtually no empirical evidence on how the employees, who the initiatives are implemented to support, might perceive their effectiveness. In this project, we adopt a mixed-methods approach to address these gaps.

Contributing to practice, the findings from all phases of the project will be used to develop a framework to support organizations in choosing effective interventions. The project also contributes to theory by providing empirical evidence of the effectiveness of workplace incivility interventions and how different types of interventions can be used to address incivility and its negative consequences. A comprehensive knowledge dissemination strategy has been developed to include international conferences, top-tier scholarly articles, and industry reports. The research team is uniquely qualified to successfully manage this project and to deliver these outcomes as it includes subject matter experts who have demonstrated proficiency in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies. The PI and two collaborators are currently collaborating with large hospitals and all team members are involved in highly engaged international networks with a track record of conducting large global studies and publishing in highly ranked journals. Lastly, the research team has many years of experience supervising graduate, doctoral and post-graduate students, and understands the value of developing research skills as part of a larger, international team.