title: Observing Incivility: What influences detection, perceived motivations, and intervention?
Creators: name: Boss, Harrison
Publisher: name: Graduate Studies
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Workplace incivility
subject: Selective incivility
subject: Workplace mistreatment
subject: Intersectionality
subject: Psychology--Industrial
subject: Psychology--Social

description: Workplace incivility can be operationalized as low-intensity rude, discourteous behaviours, that violate workplace norms of respect, and are ambiguous in their intent to harm the target. These behaviours are ubiquitous in workplaces. While incivility in the workplace is common, evidence suggests that minoritized groups are disproportionately targeted with uncivil behaviour, selective incivility, and represent a form of modern discrimination. The current dissertation explored whether non-target observers of incivility were able to differentiate between two different types of witnessed workplace mistreatment, 1) general incivility (i.e. incivility not motivated by target identity) and 2) selective incivility (i.e. incivility motivated by the target’ sociodemographic identity). Theoretically informed by literature on both Aversive Prejudice, and Bystander Intervention Models, experimental methodologies were employed in Study 1, by which participants listened to recordings of group interactions that contained general incivility, selective incivility, or no incivility. The role of experimental conditions on participants’ detection of mistreatment, motivational attributions surrounding the instigator, and interventional intentions were then assessed with regression analyses, while also exploring the potential interactive roles of bystander gender, ethnicity, and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) on these relationships using moderation. Study 2 enhanced this work, in part, by introducing evidence of longitudinal mistreatment in the recordings (i.e., reductions in incivility ambiguity), and importantly shifted to measure intervention behaviours. Regression-based analyses were conducted in Study 2, but also bolstered by the inclusion of qualitative assessments of participants’ intervention behaviours. Over both studies, data demonstrated that bystanders were able to meaningfully detect between different types of workplace incivility and attributed that mistreatment to prejudicial or generalized negative motivations of the perpetrator, based on discernible characteristics of the target (i.e. minoritized vs. non-minoritized identity). Participants that were higher in SDO tended to downplay the role of prejudice as a motivational factor behind the mistreatment of the minoritized target. Qualitative results indicated that participants had a diverse set of responses to incivility, which resulted in a variety of interventional behaviours, including providing emotional support to the victim, reprimanding the instigator, and inciting support from other observers. Notably, intervention behaviours favoured participants in the selective incivility condition (i.e., when the target was minoritized). In some cases, intervention behaviours were accompanied with evidence of victim blaming. Last, future directions for this research and other important practical implications are discussed.