Incivility or Just Another Form of Mistreatment at Work?

Abstract

In the 22 years since the concept of workplace incivility was introduced to scholars (Andersson & Pearson, 1999), a substantial body of empirical work on potential antecedents, negative outcomes, and various boundary conditions has accumulated. Despite the fascination and the considerable interest shown in investigating incivility, there are some criticisms regarding how the construct is defined and measured. There are concerns that one of the most common measurement instruments used to assess workplace incivility (the WIS-R, Cortina et al., 2013) may not be identifying uncivil behaviors in particular, but rather it may be capturing employee appraisals of various forms of interpersonal mistreatment. For example, mistreatment might encompass perceptions of another person at work engaging in bullying, undermining, abuse, or some other form of mistreatment. To support this position, a content analysis of the Workplace Incivility Scale Revised, [WIS-R] (Cortina et al., 2013) was conducted to assess if the way workplace incivility is measured is differentiating incivility from other related interpersonal mistreatment constructs. The findings bring into question the content validity of the WIS-R and raise concerns about the current approaches to the measurement of workplace incivility and workplace mistreatment in general.