Mastering Civility

CHAPTER 2

Sidelined

Twenty-one years ago on Father's Day weekend, I walked into a warm, stuffy hospital room outside Cleveland, Ohio, to find my strong, vivacious dad lying helpless with electrodes strapped onto his bare chest. It turned out that Dad had suffered a heart attack scare. What caused it? No one knows, but since he was a generally healthy guy, I have a pretty good idea that it was job-related stress. For over a decade, my father had endured not one but two extremely uncivil bosses. It was ten years before he would talk about it, but when he did, he told me that his boss had made a habit of exploding in people's faces. He insulted employees, dismissed them, degraded their efforts, and blamed them for things over which they had no control. He was even uncivil to clients. During a visit to a client's store, my dad heard his boss tell the owner, "I see you're carrying on your father's tradition. This store looked like shit then, and it looks like shit in your hands."

For years, Dad put up with this, and it took a silent toll. Dad had never been the type to complain—at least not to us. He was more concerned with providing for our family. He had four kids and wanted to send us all to college, which wouldn't be easy. So he sucked it up. When times were tough, he explained how he was extremely grateful—to be born in America, where he had freedom, and also for his faith and his family. He felt very lucky to have met and married my mom.

Eventually, though, he just couldn't take it anymore. Worried about the effects his toxic boss was having on the organization, Dad mustered up the courage to talk to his corporate boss. He knew it was risky and told my mom, "If they don't fire him, I'm done." Within weeks, the bad boss was named District Manager of the Year. Days later, Dad was in the hospital.

When I entered the hospital room that day, Dad put on a brave face, even forcing a half smile, as if to convey to us that he was fine and we shouldn't worry. I could tell he was self-conscious and embarrassed—he didn't want us to see him like this. I didn't want to see him like this. Up until this point, he had seemed invincible. But incivility has a way of catching up with people. And with organizations too.

Stress: Deadlier than We Think

Modern science has a lot to tell us about the health impacts rudeness can have. Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, explains that when people experience intermittent stressors like incivility for too long or too often, they also experience significant health problems.¹ Incivility can deplete your immune system, causing cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and ulcers. For example, a 2012 study by the Harvard School of Public Health, which tracked women for ten years, concluded that stressful jobs were just as bad for women's health as smoking and obesity.²

Studies have found that "psychosocial" factors, such as work-related stress, are the most important variables in determining the length of a life.³ While genes and associated risks matter, stress can be an even more significant factor. Arie Shirom at Tel Aviv University, and his colleagues, tracked eight hundred twenty adults who worked in various professions (from finance to manufacturing to healthcare) for twenty years. They interviewed these adults repeatedly about conditions at their jobs, the behavior of their managers, and the collegiality of their workmates—all while closely monitoring the participants' health. It wasn't the hours spent at work or other factors like workload, decision authority, or discretion that affected longevity. It was the positive support of coworkers. In fact, the presence of less-kind colleagues was associated with a much higher risk of dying.⁴ Middle-aged employees with little or no "peer social support" in the workplace were 2.4 times more likely to die during the study.⁵

Research also shows that working in a group where incivility is present affects people's mental health, even after accounting for general stress and the incivility an individual personally experienced.⁶ People tend to take the stress of incivility home with them, unleashing it on family members, who in turn carry the stress into their workplaces.⁷ Conversely, another study found links between family incivility and stress and poor performance at work.⁸

A Hefty Toll

All of this costs organizations a ton of money, to put it mildly. The American Psychological Association estimates that workplace stress costs the US economy $500 billion a year.⁹ A stunning 550 billion workdays are lost each year due to stress on the job, 60 to 80 percent of workplace accidents occur because of stress, and more than 80 percent of doctor visits are stress related. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reports that workers who feel stressed incur healthcare costs that are 46 percent higher than their less-stressed counterparts.¹⁰ One of the greatest causes of stress—accounting for about half of it—is relationship difficulties at work.¹¹

But higher healthcare costs and sick-day usage are just a few of the ways incivility hurts organizations. In a poll of eight hundred managers and employees across seventeen industries that I conducted with my colleague Christine Pearson, I learned that among workers who have been on the receiving end of incivility,

If organizations lose profits and employees thanks to incivility, much of this loss goes undetected. Employees who decide to quit based on an experience of bad behavior typically don't ever tell their employers why. Turnover costs add up quickly: four times an employee's annual salary in the case of high-level employees.¹³

And consider how much incivility drains managers' time. According to a study conducted by Accountemps and reported in Fortune, managers and executives of Fortune 1000 firms spend 13 percent of their time at work—the equivalent of seven weeks a year—mending employee relationships and dealing with the aftermath of incivility.¹⁴ That's time not spent on core activities, like coming up with new strategies, getting close to customers, or mentoring employees. Costs soar even higher when companies bring in consultants or attorneys to help settle a situation.

Lost sales represent another area in which incivility can exact a large, hidden toll. Marketing professors Debbie MacInnis and Valerie Folkes and I have documented something most of us intuitively know: Customers don't like incivility.¹⁵ In one of our experiments, we told participants that a marketing professor was helping a bank with an alumni credit card program.¹⁶ Two members of our research team presented themselves as bank representatives, explaining that they were gathering opinions about possible new logos and alternative finance options. During the experiment, half the participants witnessed incivility between the two bank representatives (one reprimanded the other for not presenting credit card mock-ups in the right sequence). The other group witnessed no incivility.

We wondered whether consumers would change perceptions of an organization or its brand if they saw employees treating one another poorly. Boy, did they ever. The vast majority—almost 80 percent—of customers who hadn't seen the employees treat one another poorly said they would use the firm's products and services in the future. But only 20 percent of consumers who had witnessed the incivility said they would. And nearly two-thirds of participants who had witnessed the incivility said they would feel anxious dealing with any employee of this company. "I wouldn't go near that place again if they paid me!" one participant said.

I was surprised at how much customers disliked seeing rude behavior. I thought at least a few customers might have seen an employee do something wrong and, upon witnessing his or her colleague deliver a reprimand, think Let her have it! But we failed to find any incidents in which customers gave rude employees a pass. It didn't matter if the employee receiving the reprimand was incompetent or did something egregious (like parking in a handicapped spot). Witnesses simply did not approve of rudeness, regardless of the circumstances.

We theorized that maybe customers disliked incivility because it ruined their experience. When you go out for a nice meal at a restaurant, the last thing you want to see is someone being treated poorly, right? Actually, customers were just as upset about incivility that was taking place behind closed doors. Participants perceived incivility as morally wrong, and they didn't believe any person deserved to be treated badly.¹⁷

Plummeting Performance

As monumental as losses due to incivility are to companies, my colleagues and I suspected that incivility was exacting an even deeper toll because of the subtle ways in which it affected people's thinking skills. Amir Erez, a management professor at the University of Florida, and I decided to find out. We gathered together a group of college students and divided them into two groups. Members of one group experienced an instance of rudeness (a disparaging remark about college students generally). Members of the other group didn't (no remark was made about college students).

In each group, respondents were placed in situations in which they received identical treatment—the same person in the same context delivered the same basic form of neutral treatment or incivility. What varied were the occasions for the behavior. In one experiment, the experimenter was rude to participants for being late; in another, a complete stranger treated participants rudely; and in a third, we asked participants to simply think about how they would react to various types of uncivil encounters.