Burning out? Watch your own incivility and the emotions you spread

The present study focuses on perpetrators of workplace incivility.

We set to answer two questions: 1) why the perpetrator instigates uncivil behaviors in the workplace, and 2) what are the consequences of workplace incivility on the perpetrator him/herself.

We examined the perpetrator burnout outcome of instigated incivility and infected emotional contagion as predictor of one's uncivil behaviors towards others and tested the cross-country structural invariance of the hypothesized nomological network on data from the U.S. and Italy.

Data from employees in the U.S. (N = 350) and Italy (N = 273) suggest that contagion of joy infected into others and anger infected into others were related to instigated incivility, which, in turn, was positively related to emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Our results were structurally invariant across the two countries.

Similar to the victims of incivility, the perpetrator of workplace incivility also suffers from heightened burnout. As such, an employee experiencing and infecting into other employees his/her own negative/positive emotions increases/decreases his/her own tendency to initiate rude behaviors toward others. Overall, our findings shed light on predictors and consequences of workplace instigated incivility. We hope our research can serve as a springboard to the understanding and prevention of incivility initiated by employees.