Category Archives: Resilience

Resilience

Career Advancement as Contest–Tournament: How to Win

Do You Accept Bad Deals?

Taya Cohen

Agreement bias is the tendency to agree (“settle”) in a negotiation even if the outcome is disadvantageous.

During negotiation, participants’ positions and interests may be significantly different.
Skillful negotiators usually end the discussion if it is unlikely to move beyond a stalemate.

Leigh Thompson

Negotiators may accept a disadvantageous deal for reasons besides personality traits, explained Carnegie Mellon’s Taya Cohen and Leigh Thompson of Northwestern with University of Toronto’s Geoffrey J. Leonardelli.

◦ Sunk Costs: Participants may wish to achieve any resolution, to derive some sense of value for the invested time and effort,

◦ Image: Negotiators may wish to appear likeable,

◦ Erroneous Anchoring: People may assume that their interests and the negotiation partner’s are mutually exclusive.

◦ Strength in Numbers: Negotiators who are outnumbered by the other negotiation team tend to agree to suboptimal deals.

As a result, negotiators may overlook “integrative” (“and/both”) solutions,

Geoffrey J Leonardelli

People negotiating teams tend to be less susceptible to agreement bias when positions and interests significantly differ, found Cohen, Thompson, and Leonardelli.

Solo negotiators demonstrated more agreeable behavior, and were more likely to agree to unfavourable conditions.
When solo negotiators were joined by only one person, they avoided unfavorable agreements thanks to additional decision support.

Douglas Jackson

Agreement bias even occurs in anonymous surveys, reported Douglas Jackson, then of Educational Testing Services and Penn State.
This acquiescence bias, is triggered when people agree to survey items no matter the content.

Samuel Messick

Social desirability concern can accelerate agreements in negotiations, surveys, and life, found Jackson and his ETS colleague Samuel Messick in a factor analysis of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) items.

Robin Pinkley

Inaccurate judgments can lead also to unfavorable agreements, noted SMU’s Robin L. Pinkley, Terri L. Griffith of Santa Clara University, and University of Illinois’s Gregory B. Northcraft.

Terri Griffith

Pinkley’s group demonstrated ineffective outcomes when negotiators :

Accurately processed inaccurate or incomplete information
(information availability errors),
Inaccurately processed valid or complete information
(information processing errors).

Gregory Northcraft

-*How do you guard against agreeing to bad deals?

-*How do you reduce Information availability errors and information processing errors?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women’s Likeability–Competence Dilemma: Overcoming the Backlash Effect

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Madeline Heilman

Aaron Wallen

Women face workplace challenges when they “succeed” in traditionally-male roles, found New York University’s Madeline Heilman, Aaron Wallen, Daniella Fuchs and Melinda Tamkins.

Melinda Tamkins

They found that woman who are recognized as successful in roles dominated by men, are less liked than equally successful men in the same fields.

Tyler Okimoto

Successful women managers avoided interpersonal hostility, dislike, and undesirability when they conveyed “communal” attributes through behaviors, testimonials of others, or their role as mothers, found Heilman, with University of Queensland’s Tyler Okimoto.

Frank Flynn

This competence-likeability disconnect was demonstrated by Stanford’s Frank Flynn in a Harvard Business School case of Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur Heidi Roizen, who was seen as competent but disliked.

Heidi Roizen

He and Cameron Anderson of UC Berkeley changed Heidi’s name to “Howard Roizen” for half of the participants who read the case.

Cameron Anderson

These volunteers rated Heidi and “Howard” on perceived competence and likeability.

Heidi was rated as equally highly competent and effective as “Howard,” but she was also evaluated as unlikeable and selfish.
Most participants said they wouldn’t want to hire her or work with her.

Whitney Johnson-Lisa Joy Rosner

Similar negative evaluations of accomplished women was illustrated in social media mentions of Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter,

Whitney Johnson, co-founder of Disruptive Advisors and her colleague Lisa Joy Rosner evaluated “Brand Passion Index” (BPI) for Sandberg, Slaughter, and Marisa Mayer over 12 months by:

Activity (number of media mentions),
Sentiment (positive or negative emotional tone),
Intensity (strong or weak sentiment).

These competent, well-known women were not liked, and were evaluated with harsh negative attributions based on media coverage and at-a-distance observations:

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s former CEO, was described as impressive and smart, and annoying, a bully,
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s former COO, was characterized as excellent, successful working mom and bizarre,
Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, was depicted as an amazing, successful mother and destructive, not a good wife,

Laurie Rudman

The competence-likeability dilemma was demonstrated in hiring behaviour experiments by Rutgers University’s Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick of Lawrence University.

Volunteers made “hiring decisions” for male and female “candidates” competing for a “feminized” managerial role and a “masculinized” managerial role.

Peter Glick

Applicants were presented as demonstrating:

Stereotypically male behaviors (“agentic”)
Stereotypically female behaviors (“communal”)
Both stereotypically male and female behaviors (“androgynous”).

Women who displayed “masculine” traits were viewed as less socially acceptable and were not selected for the “feminized” job.
However, this hiring bias did not occur when these women applied for the “male” job.

“Niceness” was not rewarded when competing for jobs: Both male and female “communal” applicants received low hiring ratings.
Combining niceness with agency improved the “hiring” outcome for “androgynous” female “applicants.”

Rudman and Glick noted that “… women must present themselves as agentic to be hirable, but may therefore be seen as interpersonally deficient.”
They advised women to “temper their agency with niceness.”

Linda Babcock

The competence-likeability disconnect is also observed when women negotiate for salary and position, reported by Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon.
Her research demonstrated negative evaluations of women who negotiate for salaries using the same script as men.

Deborah Gruenfeld

The likeability-competence dilemma may be mitigated by integrating powerful body language with appeasing behaviors that build relationships and acknowledge others’ authority, suggested Stanford’s Deborah Gruenfeld.

She posited that many women have been socialized to adopt less powerful body language including:

Smiling,
Nodding,
Tilting the head,
Applying fleeting eye contact,
Speaking in sentence fragments with uncertain, rising intonation at sentence endings.

Some people in decision roles expect women to behave in these ways, and negatively evaluate behaviors that differ from expectations.

Body language is the greatest contributor to split-second judgments (less than 100 milliseconds) of people’s competence, according to Gruenfeld.
She estimated that body language is responsible for about 55% of judgments, whereas self-presentation accounts for 38%, and words for just 7%.

Her earlier work considered body language on assessments of power, and more recently, she investigated gender differences in attributions of competence and likeability.

The likeability-competence conflict may be reduced when women give up physical space to convey approachability, empathy, and likeability, she noted.

Posing in more powerful positions for as little as two minutes can change levels of testosterone, a marker of dominance, just as holding a submissive posture for the same time can increase cortisol levels, signaling stress, according to Gruenfeld.
She suggested that women practice “the mechanics of powerful body language.”

Alison Fragale

Women’s competence-likeability dilemma is not mitigated by achieving workplace success and status.
University of North Carolina’s Alison Fragale, Benson Rosen, Carol Xu, Iryna Merideth found that successful women and men are judged more harshly for mistakes than lower status individuals who make identical errors.

Benson Rosen

Fragale’s team found that observers attributed greater intentionality, malevolence, and self-concern to the actions of high status wrongdoers than the identical actions of low status wrongdoers.
Volunteers recommended more severe punishments for higher status individuals.

Iryna Meridith

Wrongdoers who demonstrated concern for others, charitable giving, and interpersonal warmth built goodwill that could protect from subsequent mistakes.

-*How do you convey both likeability and competence?

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©Kathryn Welds

Managing “Triadic Managers” and Navigating Office Politics

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Oliver James

Some business leaders exhibit three difficult behaviors styles: Psychopathy, Narcissism, Machiavellianism, according to British psychologist and journalist, Oliver James.
He called these people “triadic managers.”

Fictional comedies and dramas satirize the stress and distress wrought by such managers, and each element of the toxic triumvirate has been empirically investigated by clinical researchers and social scientists.

The most extensively researched of the three personality trends is psychopathy, given its relevance to law enforcement.
Psychopaths typically display:

Callous manipulation, lying, and exploitation,
Grandiosity, entitlement, and shallowness,
Impulsiveness and thrill-seeking,
Little interpersonal empathy and remorse.

Ronald Schouten

More than 3 million Americans and one in 10 on Wall Street are psychopathic, asserted Harvard’s Ronald Schouten, a former federal prosecutor, who collaborated with criminal defense attorney James Silver.

James Silver

They noted that nearly 15 percent of the general population demonstrate “almost psychopathic” behavior, and many are employed as senior executives.

Robert Hare

Senior managers are four times more likely than the general population to display psychopathic tendencies, found University of British Columbia’s Robert Hare and industrial-organizational psychologist Paul Babiak.

They differentiated three types of workplace psychopaths:

Manipulator,
Bully,
Puppetmaster.
Paul Babiak

Clive Boddy

Narcissists in global business and financial contexts share characteristics of psychopaths, noted Middlesex University’s Clive Boddy:

Grandiose sense of self-importance, superiority, entitlement,
Vanity and insatiable need for attention,
Exploitativeness,
Lack of empathy.

Katarina Fritzon

About one per cent of the general population and 16 per cent of clinical groups meet the criteria for narcissism, and they can excel in professions where they can control people and elicit adulation.
Many who excel in politics, finance, entertainment, and medicine meet these criteria.

Likewise, senior business managers were more likely than criminal psychiatric patients to have narcissistic, histrionic, or obsessive-compulsive personality disorders, reported Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon, then of the University of Surrey.

Sam Vaknin

One “successful narcissist,” Sam Vaknin, recounted his career before and after his felony incarceration for securities fraud.

Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

The third element of “triadic managers”, Machiavellianism, is characterized by:

Detachment and coldness,
Manipulation,
Calculating maneuvers to advance self-interest.

Centuries after Machiavelli’s classic book, Columbia University’s Richard Christie and Florence Geis studied the Machiavellian personality and developed a personality assessment to identify these characteristics.

Given the likelihood of interacting with psychopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellian personalities in business, James sought ways to deal with them in the workplace by conducted 50 interviews with “triadic managers.”
He suggested:

Developing greater acumen in recognizing psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian workplace behaviors by closely observing others and the situation,
Managing others’ “perception of one’s performance,”
Delivering measurable results,
Selectively applying psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian workplace behaviors toward offenders while appearing sincere,
Networking to maintain relationships and allies for use in moving to a new role.

-*How do you detect and interact with colleagues who manifest characteristics of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism?

RELATED POST

Costs of Workplace Incivility

©Kathryn Welds

Could You Be Robbed While Drifting Into “Inattentional Blindness”?

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Apollo Robbins

Glitches in human awareness, perception and cognition are memorably illustrated in Apollo Robbins’ interactive Las Vegas, USA show, “The Gentleman Thief.”

He tells “targets” in the audience that he is about to steal from them, then uses visual illusions, proximity manipulation, diversion techniques, and attention control, to complete his imperceptible heists.
Robbins returns belongings to owners, including former US President Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service agents.

Robbins uses sleight-of-hand to help people improve perceptual capabilities. These skills can reduce traffic accidents, industrial mishaps, and security violations.

He overcame his own motor-skill deficits by monitoring the focus of a target’s attention: “If a person is focused elsewhere, a thief can put his whole hand in [a pocket] and steal.”

Kim Silverman

Like Kim Silverman, Research Scientist at Apple, Robbins creates “false assumptions…that look like reality…”

The U.S. Department of Defense deploys Robbins’ skills at its Special Operations Command research and training facility at Yale University, where he an adjunct professor, despite leaving school before university.

Barton Whaley

Defense application of these perceptual manipulation skills were identified by Barton Whaley of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and Susan Stratton Aykroyd in their Textbook of Political-Military Counterdeception.

Their historical survey of deception and counter-deception practices noted that amateur magicians’ practices were more advanced than those used by U.S. political or military intelligence analysts in the 1970s.

Stephen Macknik

SUNY Downstate’s Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde collaborated with Robbins on Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deception.
Their empirical results supported Robbins’s observation that the eye will follow an object moving in an arc without looking back to its point of origin.
Curved motions may be more novel than linear edges, so they attract greater attention and contribute to illusions.

Susana Martinez-Conde

Perceptual errors in illusions can suggest diagnostic and treatment methods for brain trauma, autism, ADHD, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Observing illusion performances may help patients focus on the most important aspects of their environment, while suppressing distractions that cause confusion disorientation, and “inattentional blindness” (focusing so intently on a single task that one fails to notice things in plain sight).

Richard Wiseman

Psychologist and illusionist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire demonstrated inattentional blindness when viewers fail to notice environmental changes while they focused on a card trick.
Similarly, Transport of London’s Public Service Announcement reminds viewers that it’s easy to miss things you’re not expecting in “Did you see the Moonwalking Bear?”

Wiseman suggested that people can “recognise hidden opportunities in … life,” when they intentionally reduce perceptual blindness, in Magic in Theory: An introduction to the theoretical and psychological elements of conjuring.

Daniel Levin

Daniel Simons

University of Illinois’s Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin of Vanderbilt University demonstrated that observers miss important details when they observed people passing a basketball someone in a gorilla suit walked through the action.

With Harvard’s Christopher Chabris, Simons reported that half of the observers said they did not see the gorilla when they were counting the number of ball passes by one team.

Christopher Chabris

However, the same people easily recognized the gorilla when they were not asked to focus on a distraction task.

Edward Vogel

This finding shows that most people are unable to effectively “multitask” because they have limited ability to hold a visual scene in short-term memory (VSTM), suggested University of Chicago’s Edward K. Vogel and Maro Machizawa of Hiroshima University and separately by Vanderbilt’s René Marois and J. Jay Todd.

Gustav Kuhn

Gustav Kuhn of University of London collaborated with illusionist Alym Amlani and Ronald Rensink of University of British Columbia to classify cognitive, perceptual, and physical contributors in Towards a Science of Magic:

Ronald Rensink

Physical misdirection by a magician’s gaze or gesture,
Psychological misdirection with a motion or prolonged suspense to distract from the trick’s mechanics,
Optical illusions that distort the true size of an object,
Cognitive illusions to prolong an image after the object has been removed,
Physical force and mental force influence “freely chosen” cards or other objects in magic tricks.

Rene Marois-J Jay Todd

Perceptual and cognitive illusions can cause people not to see things that are present.
This effect can lead to overlooking interpersonal cues, life opportunities.
and more dangerously, inattention in traffic accidents, and victimization.

Mindful awareness helps people pay attention to the present experience and to opportunities while mitigating potential perceptual misinformation.

-*How to you maintain focus to reduce “inattentional blindness”?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women Balance on the Negotiation Tightrope to Avoid Backlash

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Linda Babcock

Women less frequently negotiate initial salaries than men, leading to a long-term wage disparity, reported Carnegie-Mellon University’s Linda Babcock.

Hannah Riley Bowles

Women who did negotiate were negatively evaluated by both men and women participants in a lab study, found Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles and Lei Lai.
These volunteers reported less desire to work with women who asked for more money.

Lei Lai

Both male and female evaluators said they disliked “demandingness” among women who negotiated, and said they preferred “nicer” non-negotiators.
However, reducing women’s degree of assertiveness did not improve evaluators’s perceptions of women negotiators.

These findings support Babcock’s results: When male and female volunteers asked for salary increases using identical scripts in controlled lab situations, participants liked men’s style, but disliked the same words from women.
Women negotiators were considered “aggressive” unless they smiled, or displayed a warm, friendly manner.

The social reaction to women negotiators was improved when female participants:

Justified the salary request based on a supporting “business case,”
Communicated concern for organizational relationships.

Applying these tactics did not improve women’s negotiation outcomes, but improved other people’s reactions to women negotiators.

In contrast, women negotiators improved both social and negotiation outcomes when they justified the salary request based on the relationship.

Women who smile and focus on the interpersonal relationship fulfill gender role expectations, leading to greater approval by male and female observers.

Kathleen McGinn

Bowles, with Harvard colleague Kathleen McGinn and Babcock, suggested that “situational ambiguity” and “gender triggers” modify women’s willingness to negotiate.

When women have information about the potential salary range and whether the salary is negotiable, they are more likely to negotiate.
Women can improve their negotiation outcomes by asking:

the salary range,
which elements of the compensation package are negotiable.

Daniel Pink

Effective negotiation is a survival skill, according to Dan Pink:
“The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.
It has helped our species evolve, lifted our living standards, and enhanced our daily lives.”

He noted that effective persuaders and “sellers” collaborate in “inspecting” a negotiation and “responding” to the negotiation through “interpersonal attunement.”

Pink suggested ABC negotiation skills:

– Attunement: Aligning actions and attitudes with others,

– Buoyancy: “Positivity,” optimism, asking questions,

– Clarity: Helping others identify unrecognized needs that can be fulfilled by the negotiation proposal.

Joan Williams

UC Hastings College of the Law’s Joan Williams offered strategies to address documented wage discrepancies.

As more women negotiate salaries, managers may view this as an expected practice.

What is the best negotiation pitch you’ve heard for a job-related salary increase or role promotion?
How did the person overcome objections?
How did the person manage the relationship with the negotiating partner?

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©Kathryn Welds

Self Compassion, not Self-Esteem, Enhances Performance

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Juliana Breines

Self-compassion is treating one’s own mistakes with the same support and compassion offered to others, and it is more important than self-esteem to develop skills and performance, found University of California, Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen.

Self-compassion enables people to accept their mistakes and shortcomings with kindness.
It also enables equanimity when people are aware of painful thoughts and feelings.
Self-compassion is optimised when people accept responsibility for disappointing performance outcomes, and use this information to improve future performance.

Serena Chen

In Breines and Chen’s research, volunteers considered a personal setback with either:

self-compassion or
self-esteem enhancement (focusing on one’s positive qualities and accomplishments).

People who practiced a self-compassion tended to view personal shortcomings as changeable, and said they felt more motivated to improve performance by avoiding the same mistake.

Another task induced failure, then provided an opportunity to improve performance in a later challenge.
Participants who viewed their initial test failure with self-compassion devoted 25 per cent more time to preparing for future trials, and scored higher on the second test than those who focused on bolstering their self-esteem.

Self-compassion can enhance performance, suggested Breines and Chen, because it enables more dispassionate assessment of actions, abilities, and opportunities for future improvement.
In contrast, self-esteem-bolstering thoughts may narrow focus to consider only positive characteristics while overlooking opportunities for improvement.

Robert McCrae

Self-compassion measures were related to positive personality characteristics outlined in Robert McCrae and Paul Costa’s five factor model of personality known by the acronym OCEAN:

Paul Costa

Openness (curious vs. consistent/cautious)
Conscientiousness (organised vs. careless)
Extraversion (outgoing vs. reserved)
Agreeableness (friendly vs. unkind)
Neuroticism (nervous vs. confident)
in a study by Kristin Neff and Stephanie Rude of University of Texas, and Kristin Kirkpatrick of Eastern Kentucky University.

Kristin Neff

Neff’s team found that higher levels of personal well-being, optimism, initiative, conscientiousness, curiosity, happiness were associated with self-compassion.
Higher self-compassion was also related to lower anxiety and depression.

In contrast, self-criticism, was associated with imagined assessments by others and comparisons with other people.

Mark Baldwin

McGill University’s Mark Baldwin found that participants who imagined an important person providing evaluative feedback experienced more negative self-evaluations, self-criticism, and negative moods.

Compassionate self-appraisals enable people to perform better and experience more positive moods than self-critical evaluations.

-*How have you applied self-compassion to improve performance?

Working toward Goals with “Implementation Intentions”

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People are motivated by goals that enable:

Relatedness to others,
Competence in skillfully performance,
Autonomy in directing effort, according to Columbia’s Heidi Grant Halvorson.
Heidi Grant Halvorson

Juliana Breines
- She advocated working toward “better” rather than only on achieving the goal to increase performance.
This can be accomplished by acknowledging mistakes and practicing self-compassion, suggested by Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, and University of Texas‘s Kristin Neff.

The Relatedness-Competence-Autonomy model aligns with Daniel Pink’s suggestion that meaningful goals enable two similar features and one different element:

Daniel Pink

Autonomy (same): Controlling work content and context,
Mastery (like Competence): Improving skill over time through persistence, effort, corrective feedback,
Purpose (in contrast to Relatedness): Being part of an inspiring goal.

Halvorson suggested ways to move closer toward goals:

Serena Chen

-Consider the larger context of specific productive actions,

-Define reasons for doing what needs to be done – the “why,”

-Use “implementation intentions” to prepare responses for challenging situations:

–If “x” occurs (specify time, place, circumstance),
–then I will respond by doing, thinking, saying “y.”

Kristin Neff

-Apply implementation intention routines (habits) for “strategic automation” to reduce decision-overload that may undermine self-control,

-Focus on something interesting for five minutes to evoke positive feelings,

-Review “small wins” and progress toward goals.

Goal persistence can be increased, reported Stanford’s Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in a study of employees at seven companies.

Teresa Amabile

They found that “catalysts” and “nourishers” continue movement toward goals:

- Capitalise on preferred motivational style:
  -“Promotion-focused” (maximise gains, avoid missed opportunities, powered by optimism),
  -“Prevention-focused” (minimise losses, variance, powered by cautious pessimism),
- Build willpower by committing to one specific, positively-stated behavior change (“walking for 10 minutes a day every day”)
- Apply “implementation intentions,”
- Focus on a limited number of achievable goals,
- Enlist “mental contrasting” to think about the satisfaction of achieving the goal.

Carol Dweck

Halvorson collaborated with Stanford’s Carol Dweck and quoted Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right” to underscore the value of optimistic engagement with goals.

Henry Ford

They synthesized Dweck’s work on “mindsets” with Halvorson’s recommendations for setting, monitoring, protecting, executing, and celebrating goals.

An earlier post outlined Dweck’s definitions of mindsets:

• Fixed Mindset: Belief that personal capabilities are given, fixed, limited to present capacities, associated with fear, anxiety,

• Growth Mindset: View that personal capabilities can expand based on commitment, effort, practice, instruction, correcting mistakes, collaboration.

Peter Gollwitzer

Columbia’s Peter Gollwitzer refined “mindsets” by distinguishing the Deliberative Mindset of evaluating which goals to pursue from the Implementation Mindset of planning goal execution.

His team found that the Deliberative Mindset is associated with:

- Accurate, impartial analysis of goal feasibility and desirability,
- Open-mindedness.

In contrast, the Implementation Mindset is linked to:

- Optimistic, partial analysis of goal feasibility and desirability,
- Closed-mindedness.

Halvorson, Dweck and Gollwitzer translated their research on self-determination and motivation into practical recommendations for goal seekers:

- Adopt a supportive “mindset,”
- Practice “self-compassion” when encountering setbacks to achieving goals,
- Design effective responses to anticipated challenging situations,
- Use “implementation intentions” and “strategic automation” toward goals,
- Consider incremental progress toward goals.

-*What approaches help you work toward goals?

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Costs of Workplace Incivility

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Christine Pearson

A single incident of incivility in the workplace can result in significant operational costs, reported Christine Pearson of Thunderbird School of Global Management and Christine Porath of Georgetown University.
They cited consequences of workplace incivility:

Decreased work effort due to disengagement,
Christine Porath
Less time at work to reduce contact with offensive co-workers or managers,
Decreased work productivity due to ruminating about incivility incidents,
Less commitment to the organization,
Attrition.

P.M. Forni

Additional organizational symptoms include:

Increased customer complaints,
Accentuated cultural and communications barriers,
Reduced confidence in leadership,
Less adoption of changed organizational processes,
Reduced willingness to accept additional responsibility and make discretionary work efforts.

Workplace incivility behaviors were described as “rude and discourteous, displaying a lack of regard for others,” noted Pearson and Lynne Andersson, then of St. Joseph’s University.
“Uncivil” behaviors were enumerated in The Baltimore Workplace Civility Study by Johns Hopkins’ P.M. Forni and Daniel L. Buccino with David Stevens and Treva Stack of University of Baltimore:

Refusing to collaborate on a team project,
Shifting blame for an error to a co-worker,
- - Reading another’s mail,
  - Neglecting to say “please,” “thank you”,
  - Taking a co-worker’s food from the office refrigerator without asking.

Respondents classified more extreme unacceptable behaviors as “violent”:

Pushing a co-worker during an argument,
Yelling at a co-worker,
Firing a subordinate during a disagreement,
Criticizing a subordinate in public,
Using foul language in the workplace.

Gary Namie

Workplace bullying was included in Gary Namie’s Campaign Against Workplace Bullying.
He defined bullying as “the deliberate repeated, hurtful verbal mistreatment of a person (target) by a cruel perpetrator (bully).

His survey of more than 1300 respondents found that:

More than one-third of respondents observed bullying in the previous two years,
More than 80% of perpetrators were workplace supervisors,
Women bullied as frequently as men,
Women were targets of bullying 75% of the time,
Few bullies were punished, transferred, or terminated from jobs.

Costs of health-related symptoms experienced by bullying targets included:

Depression,
Sleep loss, anxiety, inability to concentrate, which reduced work productivity,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among 31% of women and 21% of men,
Frequent rumination about past bullying, leading to inattention, poor concentration, and reduced productivity.

Widespread prevalence of workplace incivility was also reported by Forni, who suggested ways to improve workplace interactions and inclusion:

Assume that others have positive intentions,
Pay attention, listen,
Include all co-workers in workplace activities,
Avoid complaints,
Acknowledge others,
Give praise when warranted,
Respect others’ opinions, time, space, indirect refusals,
Avoid asking personal questions,
Be selective in asking for favors,
Sincerely apologize when warranted,
Provide constructive suggestions for improvement,
Maintain personal grooming, health, and work environment,
Accept responsibility and blame, if deserved.

More than 95% of respondents in The Baltimore Workplace Civility Study suggested, “Keep stress and fatigue at manageable levels,” a challenging goal for leaders who shape workplace cultures.

Organizationalhange recommendations include:

Instituting a grievance process to investigate and address complaints of incivility,
Selecting prospective employees with effective interpersonal skills,
Offering a clearly-written policy on interpersonal conduct,
Adopting flexibility in scheduling, assignments, and work-life issues.

-*How do you handle workplace incivility when you observe or experience it?

©Kathryn Welds