Workplace incivility in the context of honor culture

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1640337 (Table of Contents)

The majority of research on workplace incivility has been conducted in the North American context, which is described as a dignity culture. In dignity cultures, individuals believe that they have an inherent worth that is determined by their adherence to their own standards of morality, decency and the like and therefore, cannot be decreased by others' opinions of or behaviors towards them. However, one may expect that the effect of workplace incivility will be different in honor cultures, where an individual's worth is highly contingent on others' approval and evaluation. This study investigated the effect of supervisor incivility and coworker incivility on basic needs (i.e. belongingness, control and self-esteem) and self-presentational behaviors of employees within an honor culture. Two research studies were conducted to test the proposed relationships. The first study was a daily diary study. In this study, the data was collected from 132 employees over a period of two-weeks and analyzed through multilevel modelling. The results indicated that daily supervisor incivility threatened daily belongingness, control and self-esteem needs of employees. Moreover, these negative effects became more pronounced for individuals with high honor orientation. Needs threats, in turn, differentially mediated the effects of workplace incivility on selfV presentational behaviors. Honor orientation acted as a first-stage moderator, increased the strength of these indirect effects. As a second study, a vignette experiment was conducted with 237 employees. This study focused specifically on the effects of supervisor incivility and primed honor via a word completion task. The results revealed that there may be similarities as well as differences in within- and between-person effects of workplace incivility. Overall, the findings of both studies suggested that workplace incivility and experienced need threats are likely to stimulate a self-protection mechanism in employees.