Incivility

Abstract

Incivility is a form of social behavior: low-intensity rude, discourteous, or disrespectful conduct whose intent to harm is ambiguous, most studied as a feature of workplaces. The field turns on a deceptively small behavior with outsized consequences. This article develops its main threads: the founding definition and the incivility spiral by which minor slights escalate into open aggression; the incidence and health impact of incivility on those who experience it; the experimental finding that rudeness degrades cognitive performance and helpfulness—in targets, in onlookers, and in medical teams; the reframing of selective incivility as a covert form of modern discrimination; and the spread of incivility into online and political discourse. A worked example and three interactive demonstrations make the mechanisms manipulable.

Keywords: incivility, social behavior, workplace incivility, incivility spiral, selective incivility

A colleague who reads email through a meeting, a curt reply that omits the greeting, a credit quietly taken, an interruption that lands just often enough to sting—none of these is assault, and each is easy to wave away. Yet the accumulation of such small discourtesies turns out to carry costs out of all proportion to any single act: lost effort, lost attention, worsened health, and a tendency to breed more of the same. The behavioural sciences gave this low-intensity rudeness a name, a definition, and—over two decades—a large empirical literature (Schilpzand et al., 2016).

What makes incivility distinctive is precisely its ambiguity. Unlike overt aggression, an uncivil act leaves its intent unclear: the slight may have been careless rather than hostile, which lets the instigator deny malice and leaves the target uncertain whether to respond. That ambiguity is not incidental; it is built into the concept, and it is what allows incivility to spiral, to hide as discrimination, and to resist the sanctions that overt misconduct would attract. The sections below take these threads in turn, after first placing incivility within the broader category of social behavior under which it is classified.

What Incivility Is

Incivility, in the sense the organizational sciences study it, is low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target, in violation of workplace norms for mutual respect—the definition Lynne Andersson and Christine Pearson gave the construct when they introduced it (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). Three features do the work. It is low-intensity: rudeness, discourtesy, and condescension rather than threat or violence. Its intent is ambiguous: the act can plausibly be read as thoughtless rather than malicious, which distinguishes it from overt aggression and gives it its characteristic deniability. And it violates norms of mutual respect: it breaches the shared expectations of courtesy that ordinarily govern interaction.

These features place incivility at the mild end of a continuum of counter-normative workplace behavior whose severe end is overt aggression and violence. The distinction from aggression is not one of form alone but of ambiguity: aggression carries clear intent to harm, whereas incivility's harm is precisely what cannot be established, so the two are better treated as related but separable constructs than as points on a single scale (Schilpzand et al., 2016). A second useful distinction is by vantage point. The same uncivil episode can be studied as experienced incivility (what a target reports receiving), instigated incivility (what a person reports doing), or witnessed incivility (what a bystander observes); these are correlated but distinct, and a review of the construct's validity found that experienced incivility in particular behaves as a coherent, measurable construct with a predictable network of causes and effects (Yao et al., 2022).

In the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary, Incivility is a descriptor filed under Social Behavior, and the placement is apt: incivility is social through and through, defined entirely by the breach of a shared interpersonal norm and intelligible only against the backdrop of the courtesy it violates. Much of what makes it consequential—its tendency to be returned, its uneven distribution across groups, its drain on the attention of everyone nearby—follows from its being a relationship between people rather than a property of one. The remainder of this article takes these consequences in turn, and the costs are not small: a widely cited survey of managers and professionals documented that targets of incivility deliberately cut their work effort, time, and quality in response (Pearson & Porath, 2005).

Perspectives on Incivility

The study of incivility is organised less by one grand theory than by a set of complementary perspectives, each tied to a distinct question. A spiral perspective asked how minor slights escalate, and answered in terms of reciprocal exchange that ratchets upward in intensity. An incidence-and-impact perspective asked how common incivility is and what it does to those who experience it, and answered with survey evidence linking it to distress, poorer health, and withdrawal. A performance perspective asked what rudeness does to cognition, and found it degrades the thinking of targets and onlookers alike. A discrimination perspective asked who gets treated uncivilly, and found the burden falls disproportionately on women and racial minorities. A diffusion perspective asked where incivility now occurs, and followed it out of the workplace into online and political life. Table 1 summarises them, and the sections that follow develop each in turn.

Table 1

Perspectives on Incivility

The Incivility Spiral

The founding insight of the field is that incivility does not stay small. Andersson and Pearson argued that an uncivil act, because it breaches a norm of respect, is readily perceived by its target as unfair, and that the natural response—reciprocity—returns incivility at a slightly higher intensity. Each party, feeling itself the wronged one, answers in kind and a little harder, so the exchange climbs an incivility spiral: discourtesy begets rudeness, rudeness begets insult, and the escalation can cross a tipping point at which one party, feeling its identity or standing under threat, shifts from ambiguous incivility to unambiguous, coercive aggression (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). The ambiguity of each step is what keeps the spiral alive: because no single act is clearly aggressive, neither party sees itself as the aggressor, and third parties have no clear norm violation to sanction.

The spiral was for two decades a theoretical claim; daily-diary methods later put it to a direct test. Christopher Rosen and colleagues tracked employees across workdays and found that experiencing incivility in the morning predicted instigating incivility later the same day—incivility literally begetting incivility within a person over hours—and that the link ran through depleted self-control: being treated rudely taxes the regulatory resources that would otherwise restrain one's own rudeness (Rosen et al., 2016). The finding grounds the spiral in a mechanism and locates it inside the individual as well as between parties. Demo 1 lets the reader set the initial intensity of a slight and the gain at which each party escalates, and watch whether and when the exchange crosses the tipping point into aggression.

Incidence and Impact

How common is incivility, and what does it cost those who meet it? Lilia Cortina and colleagues conducted the first systematic incidence study, surveying public-sector employees, and found experienced incivility to be widespread: a large majority reported some uncivil treatment over the preceding five years, and those who did reported lower job satisfaction, greater psychological distress, and more thoughts of leaving (Cortina et al., 2001). The harm was not confined to the job. Following employees over time, Sandy Lim, Cortina, and Vicki Magley showed that both personal incivility (aimed at oneself) and workgroup incivility (witnessed around oneself) predicted lower job and co-worker satisfaction, which in turn predicted poorer mental and physical health—so the effects of incivility reach the body and spread beyond its direct targets to everyone in the group (Lim et al., 2008).

Incivility also drives people away and drags down their work. Studying customer-facing employees, Michael Sliter and colleagues found that incivility from customers—and, separately, from co-workers—predicted absenteeism and lower sales performance, as targets withdrew effort and attention from a job that had become a source of mistreatment (Sliter et al., 2012). The managerial survey behind much of this literature put concrete numbers to the withdrawal: among employees who had been treated uncivilly, large fractions reported deliberately decreasing their work effort, time at work, and quality of work, and a non-trivial fraction left their jobs altogether to escape the treatment (Pearson & Porath, 2005). Demo 2 lets the reader scale those response rates across a workforce and read off the aggregate productivity cost.

Rudeness and Performance

If the survey work showed that incivility correlates with worse outcomes, the experimental work showed that rudeness causes worse thinking. Christine Porath and Amir Erez had participants experience a rude remark—from an experimenter or a stranger—and then perform unrelated tasks; a single episode of rudeness lowered performance on both routine and creative tasks and reduced participants' willingness to help others, even though the rudeness had nothing to do with the task and came from someone the participant would never see again (Porath & Erez, 2007). The effect does not require being the target. In a second programme they showed that merely witnessing rudeness—seeing someone else be treated discourteously—was enough to depress onlookers' performance on routine tasks and, especially, their flexibility and creativity (Porath & Erez, 2009). Rudeness, in other words, is cognitively contagious: it taxes the attention of everyone in the room.

The most consequential demonstration moved the effect into a setting where cognitive errors cost lives. Arieh Riskin and colleagues ran a randomised simulation in which neonatal intensive-care teams were exposed, at the start of a training exercise, to a mildly rude comment from an observer; the teams that heard the remark went on to perform measurably worse across the diagnostic and procedural tasks of the simulation than teams that did not, the rudeness degrading the information-sharing and help-seeking on which the team depended (Riskin et al., 2015). That a passing discourtesy could impair a medical team's functioning made vivid how a behavior dismissed as trivial reaches directly into performance. Demo 3 lets the reader compare performance across exposure conditions—no rudeness, witnessed, directly targeted—and task types.

Selective Incivility and Modern Discrimination

Who is treated uncivilly is not random. Cortina argued that incivility often serves as a vehicle for bias that can no longer be expressed openly: because an uncivil act is low-intensity and ambiguous in intent, it offers a deniable channel through which prejudice against women and racial minorities can be enacted without being named as discrimination—a phenomenon she called selective incivility (Cortina, 2008). The theory connects the organizational literature on incivility to the social-psychological literature on modern or aversive racism and sexism, in which prejudice is expressed covertly and is often disavowed even by those who hold it. The empirical test came later: surveying employees across several organizations, Cortina and colleagues found that women and racial minorities did report more frequent incivility, that the two overlapped, and that this selective incivility predicted the same withdrawal and distress outcomes as discrimination more broadly (Cortina et al., 2013).

The selective-incivility account reframes what looks like a matter of mere manners as a matter of equity. If some of the rudeness in an organization is patterned by gender and race, then treating incivility purely as an interpersonal lapse—to be fixed by etiquette reminders—misses that it can function as discrimination operating below the threshold at which formal remedies apply. The ambiguity that defines incivility is, on this view, not a bug but the very feature that makes it a useful instrument of bias.

Online and Political Incivility

Incivility is no longer only a workplace phenomenon; it has become a defining feature of online and political discourse, and it distorts judgment there too. Ashley Anderson and colleagues ran an experiment on science communication that became known as the nasty effect: readers who saw an identical, balanced blog post about an emerging technology formed more polarised risk perceptions when the comments below it were uncivil than when the same comments were civil—the rudeness of strangers in a comment thread reaching back to colour readers' interpretation of the article itself (Anderson et al., 2014). The study showed that incivility in public discourse is not merely unpleasant but consequential for how audiences reason, hardening attitudes and widening divisions over matters of fact.

The nasty effect connects the organizational construct to a much larger public concern about the coarsening of civic and online life. The mechanisms are plausibly the same ones the workplace literature identified—the ambiguity that licenses escalation, the contagion that spreads affect to onlookers—now operating at the scale of mass media rather than a single office, which is why civility has become a concern for platform designers and public institutions as much as for managers.

Worked Example

The mechanisms become concrete in three small exercises, each matching one of the demonstrations. The numbers below are illustrative—they capture the qualitative shape of the published findings rather than reproducing any single reported statistic.

The incivility spiral (escalation to a tipping point). Model the intensity of successive uncivil acts as a geometric escalation. Let the first slight have intensity I​₀ on a 0–10 scale, and let each party return the last act at a gain g, so that I​_t = I​₀ × (1 + g)^t. With a mild opening slight I​₀ = 2 and a modest escalation gain g = 0.5, the exchange runs 2.0, 3.0, 4.5, 6.75, 10.1—crossing a tipping-point threshold of T = 8 at the fifth exchange, where ambiguous incivility becomes open aggression. Halve the gain to g = 0.25 and the series climbs 2.0, 2.5, 3.1, 3.9, 4.9, 6.1, 7.6, 9.5—reaching the same threshold only at the eighth exchange. The lesson is in the exponent: small differences in how hard each party escalates translate into large differences in how soon the spiral turns coercive. Demo 1 lets the reader set I​₀, g, and T and read off the exchange at which the tipping point is crossed.

Rudeness and performance (an exposure penalty). Represent performance as a percentage of an unexposed baseline of 100. Assign each exposure condition a penalty: being a direct target of rudeness costs 25 points, merely witnessing it costs 15, and a control condition costs 0; and let creative tasks be more sensitive than routine ones by a factor of 1.4. A targeted participant on a creative task performs at 100 − (25 × 1.4) = 100 − 35 = 65 percent of baseline; the same participant on a routine task performs at 100 − 25 = 75 percent; a mere onlooker on a creative task performs at 100 − (15 × 1.4) = 100 − 21 = 79 percent. The ordering—target worse than witness, creative worse than routine—reproduces the qualitative pattern Porath and Erez reported, and the non-zero witness penalty is the cognitive contagion that makes incivility a problem for everyone present. Demo 2 lets the reader toggle exposure and task and read off the predicted performance.

The organizational cost of incivility (aggregate withdrawal). Suppose 100 employees are each treated uncivilly over a year, and model the deliberate withdrawal the managerial survey documented: a fraction f​_effort = 0.48 cut their work effort, f​_time = 0.47 cut time at work, and f​_quality = 0.38 cut work quality. If each affected employee who withdraws effort loses an average of 10% of a notional 2,000 annual productive hours, the effort channel alone costs 0.48 × 100 × 0.10 × 2,000 = 9,600 hours across the workforce; adding a 5%-of-hours loss on the time channel (0.47 × 100 × 0.05 × 2,000 = 4,700) brings the running total to 14,300 hours before quality effects are counted. The arithmetic is deliberately simple; its point is that per-incident withdrawal rates in the 40–50% range, multiplied across a workforce, turn a behavior dismissed as trivial into a five-figure productivity drain. Demo 3 lets the reader set the workforce size and response rates and watch the aggregate cost accumulate.

Discussion

Read across its perspectives, the science of incivility tells a coherent story about a behavior that is minor by construction yet major in aggregate. The defining features—low intensity and ambiguous intent—are exactly what make incivility consequential: ambiguity lets it escalate through a spiral in which neither party sees itself as the aggressor, lets it hide as deniable discrimination against those already disadvantaged, and lets it evade the sanctions that overt aggression would draw (Andersson & Pearson, 1999; Cortina, 2008). The incidence work established that the behavior is common and that its costs reach well beyond hurt feelings into mental and physical health and into the decision to quit (Cortina et al., 2001; Lim et al., 2008).

The experimental work supplied the causal core the surveys could only suggest: a single rude remark measurably degrades cognition and cooperation, in targets and onlookers alike, and even in teams whose errors carry clinical consequence (Porath & Erez, 2007; Riskin et al., 2015). Because the harm is real and the behavior is common, the natural question is what to do about it, and here the literature points not at policing individual slights—whose ambiguity defeats enforcement—but at the group norms that permit or forbid them. Brian Walsh and colleagues developed a brief measure of workgroup civility norms, the shared expectations that restrain incivility, which underpins interventions such as the Civility, Respect, and Engagement in the Workplace programme that shift the climate of a unit rather than sanction its members one by one (Walsh et al., 2012). The honest summary is that incivility is small, common, contagious, patterned by bias, and best addressed at the level of norms rather than acts.

Current Directions

The field's most useful recent product is consolidation. Shannon Han and colleagues meta-analysed two decades of workplace-incivility research, integrating its antecedents, consequences, and boundary conditions into a single quantitative map: experienced incivility is reliably predicted by features of the work environment and reliably predicts strain, withdrawal, and counterproductive behavior, with the strength of these links moderated by individual and contextual factors (Han et al., 2022). A parallel meta-analysis by Jie Yao and colleagues addressed the prior, more basic question of whether experienced incivility is even a coherent construct, and concluded that it is—distinguishable from related mistreatment constructs and embedded in a sensible nomological network—while cautioning that its heavy reliance on single-source self-report leaves open questions about method variance (Yao et al., 2022). Together the two establish that the construct is both real and well mapped.

Two threads point forward. The daily-diary work on spirals has shifted attention from stable between-person differences to within-person dynamics—how a person's own incivility ebbs and flows across a day as self-control is depleted and restored—which reframes prevention as a question of protecting regulatory resources rather than selecting civil people (Rosen et al., 2016). And the comprehensive review by Pauline Schilpzand, Irene De Pater, and Amir Erez set an agenda that the field is still working through: better causal and longitudinal designs, more attention to instigators and to the cultural and cross-national generality of findings, and a clearer account of how incivility interacts with the other forms of mistreatment it so often accompanies (Schilpzand et al., 2016).

Common Misconceptions

Incivility is just rudeness, too trivial to study.

Its low intensity is the point, not a reason to dismiss it. Precisely because each act is minor and ambiguous, incivility escalates unchecked, hides as discrimination, and accumulates into large costs—a single rude remark measurably degrades the performance of a medical team (Riskin et al., 2015).

Incivility is the same thing as workplace aggression or bullying.

They are related but distinct. Aggression carries clear intent to harm; incivility's defining feature is that its intent is ambiguous, which is exactly what lets it be denied and what separates it from overt aggression on a continuum of mistreatment (Andersson & Pearson, 1999).

Only the direct target of rudeness is harmed.

Merely witnessing incivility depresses an onlooker's performance and flexibility, and workgroup incivility predicts poorer health even in those not personally targeted. The harm spreads to everyone in the setting (Porath & Erez, 2009; Lim et al., 2008).

Who gets treated uncivilly is essentially random.

It is patterned. Incivility falls disproportionately on women and racial minorities, functioning as a deniable, low-intensity channel for bias that can no longer be expressed openly—what Cortina termed selective incivility (Cortina, 2008).

Glossary

Aversive racism.

A form of modern prejudice in which bias is expressed covertly and often disavowed even by those who hold it; the broader phenomenon to which selective incivility connects workplace mistreatment.

Civility norms.

The shared expectations within a workgroup about how courteously members should treat one another; a measurable climate variable that restrains incivility and the lever used by civility interventions.

Civility.

Behaviour that honours the shared norms of mutual respect governing interaction; the standard whose violation defines incivility, and the target of climate-level interventions.

Experienced incivility.

Incivility as reported by its target—the uncivil treatment a person says they received; the most-studied vantage point and the one with the clearest construct validity.

Incivility spiral.

The escalation by which an uncivil act, perceived as unfair, is reciprocated at rising intensity until the exchange crosses a tipping point into coercive aggression.

Incivility.

Low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target, in violation of norms for mutual respect; the subject of this article and a MeSH descriptor filed under social behavior.

Instigated incivility.

Incivility as reported by its perpetrator—the uncivil treatment a person says they enacted; correlated with but distinct from experienced and witnessed incivility.

Intent ambiguity.

The defining uncertainty about whether an uncivil act was hostile or merely careless; the feature that distinguishes incivility from aggression and enables its escalation, concealment, and deniability.

Modern discrimination.

Bias expressed through subtle, deniable acts rather than open hostility; the framework under which selective incivility is understood as discrimination operating below formal thresholds.

Nasty effect.

The finding that uncivil comments accompanying an otherwise balanced message polarise readers' interpretations of the message itself; incivility's distortion of public reasoning online.

Negative reciprocity.

The tendency to return a harm with a harm; the exchange rule that drives the incivility spiral, as each party answers a slight with a slightly greater one.

Selective incivility.

Cortina's account of incivility aimed disproportionately at women and racial minorities, functioning as a covert, deniable channel for prejudice that can no longer be voiced openly.

Social behavior.

Action directed at or shaped by other members of one's species; the MeSH parent category under which incivility is filed, since it is defined by the breach of a shared interpersonal norm.

Tipping point.

The intensity threshold in the incivility spiral at which an exchange shifts from ambiguous incivility to unambiguous, coercive aggression, often when a party's identity or standing feels threatened.

Witnessed incivility.

Incivility observed by a bystander rather than aimed at them; a distinct vantage point that nonetheless degrades the onlooker's own performance and well-being.

Key Researchers

Lynne M. Andersson

(Associate Professor of Management, Fox School of Business, Temple University). Co-originated the construct of workplace incivility and the incivility spiral, giving the field its founding definition and theory. Google Scholar · Faculty Page

Lilia M. Cortina

(Professor of Psychology and Women's & Gender Studies, University of Michigan). Conducted the first systematic incidence study of workplace incivility and developed the theory of selective incivility as modern discrimination. Faculty Page

Amir Erez

(W. A. McGriff III Professor of Management, Warrington College of Business, University of Florida). Showed experimentally that rudeness degrades task performance, helpfulness, and medical-team functioning in targets and onlookers alike. Google Scholar · Faculty Page

Vicki J. Magley

(Professor of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut). Studies workplace incivility, civility-climate interventions, and the measurement of civility norms, and co-authored foundational incidence and impact work. ORCID · Google Scholar · Faculty Page

Christine M. Pearson

(Professor of Global Leadership, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University). Co-originated the workplace-incivility construct and documented its organizational costs in surveys of managers and professionals. Google Scholar · Faculty Page

Christine L. Porath

(Clinical Professor of Organizational Behavior, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina). A leading scholar of incivility and civility whose experiments established that rudeness degrades cognition and cooperation. Faculty Page

Frequently Asked Questions

What is incivility in psychology?

Incivility is low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target, in violation of norms for mutual respect—rudeness, discourtesy, and condescension rather than threat or violence. It is studied chiefly as workplace incivility and is distinguished from overt aggression by the ambiguity of its intent (Andersson & Pearson, 1999).

What is the incivility spiral?

It is the tendency of minor slights to escalate: because an uncivil act is perceived as unfair, it is reciprocated at slightly higher intensity, and the exchange climbs until it crosses a tipping point into open, coercive aggression. The ambiguity of each step keeps either party from seeing itself as the aggressor (Andersson & Pearson, 1999).

How common is workplace incivility, and does it really matter?

It is common—most employees report some uncivil treatment over a span of years—and it matters. Experienced incivility predicts lower job satisfaction, greater psychological distress, worse physical health, and withdrawal from work, and a single rude remark can measurably impair a medical team's performance (Cortina et al., 2001; Riskin et al., 2015).

Does rudeness actually reduce performance?

Yes, experimentally. A single episode of rudeness lowers performance on both routine and creative tasks and reduces willingness to help, even when the rudeness is unrelated to the task and comes from a stranger. The effect appears in direct targets and, strikingly, in mere onlookers (Porath & Erez, 2007; Porath & Erez, 2009).

Can a person be harmed by incivility they only witness?

Yes. Watching someone else be treated rudely depresses an onlooker's performance and flexibility, and incivility witnessed around oneself predicts poorer health even without being personally targeted. Incivility is in this sense cognitively and emotionally contagious (Porath & Erez, 2009; Lim et al., 2008).

What is selective incivility?

It is Cortina's account of incivility that falls disproportionately on women and racial minorities, functioning as a covert, deniable form of modern discrimination: because an uncivil act is ambiguous and low-intensity, it offers a channel for bias that can no longer be expressed openly (Cortina, 2008; Cortina et al., 2013).

How is incivility different from bullying or aggression?

By the clarity of intent. Workplace aggression and bullying involve clear intent to harm, often repeated and escalated; incivility's defining feature is that its intent is ambiguous and can be plausibly denied. They sit on a continuum of mistreatment but are treated as related, separable constructs (Andersson & Pearson, 1999).

What can organizations do about incivility?

Because the ambiguity of individual acts defeats case-by-case enforcement, the evidence favours shifting group norms rather than policing slights. Measuring and strengthening workgroup civility norms underpins climate interventions that reduce incivility across a unit rather than sanctioning its members one by one (Walsh et al., 2012).

References

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