The Construal of Workplace Incivility in Honor Cultures: Evidence From Turkey

Abstract

Most research on workplace incivility has been conducted in the United States, where the cultural logic of dignity prescribes that individuals’ worthiness be determined in reference to self-set standards. This inductive study explores the construal of workplace incivility in a contrasting cultural logic of honor, where an individual’s worth is largely dependent on the esteem of others. In particular, it seeks to understand how the logic of honor may influence which behaviors are labeled as incivility and which criteria are used to appraise uncivil behaviors in the Turkish context. In the first phase of the study, we asked 53 Turkish employees for examples of workplace incivility behaviors and generated 32 incivility episodes. In the second and third phases, using data from 35 business students and 106 Turkish employees, we analyzed these episodes using multidimensional scaling technique. The results suggested that workplace incivility may have both universal and culturally salient manifestations, and that Turkish respondents appraised uncivil behaviors along three dimensions: honor threatening versus ordinary, excluding versus intruding, inoffensive versus offensive. We further observed that Turkish participants differentiated the power of the instigator (supervisor vs. coworker) as well as the omission of versus commission of behaviors. We discuss the results with a focus on understanding how the honor logic may manifest itself in professional relationships.