Workplace Incivility and Turnover Intention in Organizations: A Meta-Analytic Review.

Boshra H Namin,Jo Røislien,Torvald Øgaard

doi:10.3390/ijerph19010025

Boshra H Namin, Jo Røislien + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19010025

Copy DOI

Abstract

Incivility has been identified as a prevalent and crucial issue in workplaces and one that may be associated with detrimental effects on employees and organizational outcomes, such as turnover intention. Many studies have been published regarding the effects of incivility, but there is a lack of integrative reviews and meta-analyses. The aim of the present study is to conduct an early meta-analysis of the relationship between employees’ perceptions of workplace incivility and their turnover intentions. Six databases, including ISI Web of Science, PsychInfo, Scopus, Emerald, Hospitality & Tourism Complete, and Soc Index, were searched to identify empirical articles for this meta-analytical paper. The results of statistical meta-analyses and meta-regression suggest that there is a positive relationship between perceived incivility and turnover intentions in employees and that relationship is consistent across different sources of workplace incivility. However, we did observe a possible interaction effect of “supervisor” and “coworker incivility”. The results also suggest that the relationship between workplace incivility and turnover intention is stronger in the academic sector than in other industries and stronger in the United States than in other countries.

Highlights

In recent decades, a distinct stream of research has focused on workplace incivility as a unique and lesser form of interpersonal mistreatment, which is prevalent and causes severe problems in various organizations [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
The current study focused on the antecedent role of workplace incivility, which is a form of job stress according to the mentioned meta-analysis study [53]
The results indicated that for the academic sector, workplace incivility was associated with a higher turnover intention compared to the healthcare sector (Table 4)

Summary

Introduction

A distinct stream of research has focused on workplace incivility as a unique and lesser form of interpersonal mistreatment, which is prevalent and causes severe problems in various organizations [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Workplace incivility was first introduced in [12], which identified it by its ambiguity of intent and violation of workplace norms for mutual respect. Workplace incivility generally encompasses recurrent rude and disrespectful behavior that violates mutual respect in the workplace with a low-intensity and unclear intent to harm the target [12], which is a widespread phenomenon in the working environment [13,14]. Based on estimation in [15], cognitive distraction from work and project delays caused by workers being subjected to incivility lead to an annual cost of $14,000 per employee. Employees who are the target of uncivil behavior in the workplace have to bear considerable human costs, such as emotional exhaustion [16], depression [17], and increased fear, sadness, and anger [18]. Emotional exhaustion [1,21,22], job burnout [23,24], perceived organizational

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion