Workers’ Observation of Uncivil Leadership: Is Tolerance for Workplace Incivility a Gendered Issue?

Isabel Carmona-Cobo,Esther Lopez-Zafra,Eva Garrosa

doi:10.3390/su13116111

Isabel Carmona-Cobo, Esther Lopez-Zafra + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116111

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Abstract

In the context of organizational psychology, this study aimed to examine workers’ gender biases in tolerance when observing leaders’ incivility in the workplace. Based on role congruity theory, this paper proposes analyzing the gender differences in workers’ evaluations of awareness and tolerance of workplace incivility considering the gender of a leader who commits different incivility behaviors against an employee. Moreover, we posit that the type of incivility is also gendered. A sample of 547 workers (male and female) randomly played the roles of observers whereby they rated a scenario describing a leader (male or female) who publicly humiliates and openly doubts an employee’s judgment (overt incivility—agentic), or leaves out and pays little attention (covert incivility—communal) to an employee. The results indicate that male workers tolerated incivility less when role incongruence occurred, such as when male leaders used covert incivility. In contrast, female workers were consistently less tolerant when role congruence occurred with the leader’s gender, such as when male leaders were overtly uncivil. Furthermore, compared to males, female workers were more aware and less tolerant of incivility when a female leader was overtly or covertly uncivil. This paper provides empirical insights and fulfills an identified need to study how gender bias in workplace incivility can be enabled in organizations. The implications for practice can drive the development of prevention strategies within the field of management and human resources.

Highlights

In the field of organizational psychology, the knowledge about interpersonal mistreatment in the workplace has led to the development of a wealth of constructs [1]
We explored the impacts of our three independent variables by conducting a series of analyses of variance (ANOVAs) on the participants’ scores of the awareness and tolerance for incivility-dependent variables
This study focuses on current workers’ observers as third parties in the incivility spiral and analyzes the observer–perpetrator context, which is a new approach that allows incivility to continue as a process in some enterprises

Summary

Introduction

In the field of organizational psychology, the knowledge about interpersonal mistreatment in the workplace has led to the development of a wealth of constructs [1]. In this issue, workplace incivility refers to a subtle form of interpersonal mistreatment at work, where women workers are frequently victims [2,3,4,5]. Workplace incivility refers to a subtle form of interpersonal mistreatment at work, where women workers are frequently victims [2,3,4,5] It has been defined as “a low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target, in violation of workplace norms for mutual respect” [6] Recent evidence demonstrates its effects on behavioral responses [7]

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