August 4th 2026
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WellBeing Magazine
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You will spend about 90,000 hours at work in your lifetime. Research published by RMIT University in 2025 indicated that more than 90 per cent of workers have experienced
incivility and that it leads to reduced performance, burnout, employee turnover, and financial cost to employee and business. In a paper published in the journal Stress and Health in 2023, Dionisi and Dupre described incivility as a workplace “cancer”. Just like cancer, prevention is the key to dealing with incivility, but to do that we need to understand how to recognise it and the conditions that allow it to flourish.
What is it?
The term “workplace incivility” was coined in a study published in the journal Academy of Management Review in 1999. Of course, the phenomenon existed long before this, but it was this study that first used the term and came up with a definition. That definition was: “Low-intensity deviant behaviour with ambiguous intent to harm the target, in violation of workplace norms for mutual respect. Uncivil behaviours are characteristically rude and discourteous, displaying a lack of regard for others.”
Fundamentally, workplace incivility is rudeness or discourtesy and, importantly, it hurts. We will get back to that “hurt”, including who and what are damaged, a little later, but first let’s think about what workplace rudeness might look like. Recent academic papers have said that workplace incivility encompasses behaviour that is disruptive,
disrespectful, and which promotes disharmony. Incivility is not necessarily aimed at one person in particular, but is a range of ongoing interpersonal behaviours including dismissiveness, rudeness, aggression, condescension, blaming, exclusion, sabotaging, micromanagement and undermining.
Anyone can have a bad day or a bad moment and fall into rudeness. That is not incivility, it is humanity. However, when a manner of relating to others is persistent and widespread, then that is incivility.
Inbox incivility
According to the US National Institutes of Health, the average office worker receives around 120 emails per day and spends about 28 per cent of their day reading and responding to emails. If incivility is present in the workplace, it will appear in emails and it will manifest in very specific ways.
Emails that lack civility may be dismissive or curt, or they may lack the basic courtesies such as greetings and “thank you”. An insidious form of email incivility is to copy additional people into emails that could be just between two people, especially when the email is on a contentious topic. A 2024 study published in the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing found that copying unnecessary people into emails both contributes to a climate of workplace incivility and adds to feelings of stress due to the sheer volume of emails received.
Emails are remote and impersonal, so that the care people might take if they were face-to-face with someone is not always evident. Emails are also devoid of context, like a smile or a tone of voice. Additionally, the very ease of emails means they can be dashed off without too much thought. Of course, this does not excuse email incivility because most people can manage to compensate for the potential pitfalls, but it does highlight why emails are often a manifestation of an individual’s incivility.
The inception of incivility
Incivility does not exist in a vacuum. There is a lot of research that tells us about the workplace conditions that lead to workplace incivility. A study published in 2022 in the Journal of Advanced Nursing showed that stress, heavy workloads and unreasonable deadlines can contribute to people behaving aggressively and with incivility towards work colleagues.
Other factors that breed incivility are poor leadership, ineffective communication, inadequate resources, and lack of developmental training. When leaders are uncivilised in their interactions and there is no repercussion for this behaviour, then incivility can become normalised in the culture. This can happen with a nation or with a workplace, and leaders need to embody the civil values they want their workplace to reflect.
In the business setting, poor communication leads to misunderstandings that in turn can result in incivility. Vague policies lead to uncertain communication and under those circumstances, inappropriate behaviour can thrive.
One thing we know for certain is that once incivility is tolerated, more incivility will follow. Studies show that rudeness begets rudeness. A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that people who were the subject of rude or uncivil behaviour experienced increased mental fatigue. In turn this reduced their level of self-control, which made it more likely that they would behave in a rude or uncivil manner later in the day. These spirals of incivility are not intentional, but still damaging to the organisation.
The effects of incivility
Incivility in the workplace attacks your sense of self as well as your professional safety, and it does have significant personal effects that lead on to implications for the organisation.
Loss of self-efficacy
Self-efficacy refers to how you rate your ability to perform a specific task. It is related to your conception of your abilities and sense of inherent worth. In a study published in the January 2026 issue of the Journal of Business and Psychology, researchers argued that workplace incivility undermines self-efficacy by fostering a negative view of your own abilities. Employees with lowered self-efficacy avoid challenging tasks, have low motivation, and show poor resilience in the face of setbacks.
Emotional exhaustion
A 2025 study from the Journal of Workplace Behavioural Health showed that workplace incivility contributed to emotional exhaustion for employees and that this manifested as poor sleep and excessive rumination (going over and over thoughts in your head).
Disengagement
Research tells us that incivility in the workplace is inversely associated with employee engagement. The theory behind this is that when incivility becomes a sustained stressor, employees must use mental and physical energy to defend themselves. Workers will disengage as a way of protecting their energy reserves and overall wellbeing. Disengagement combined with emotional exhaustion is what “burnout” looks like.
Cyberloafing
In 2022, the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology published a study looking specifically at email incivility. They found that receiving uncivil email in the morning led to negative emotions and a resultant increase in “cyberloafing” in the afternoon, where employees use the internet or personal devices for non-work-related activities during business hours.
Profit and productivity losses
The cumulative effects of emotional exhaustion, disengagement, and loss of self-efficacy arising from incivility means absenteeism increases and productivity drops. No organisation is optimised under these circumstances.
Staff turnover
Employees stay with organisations when they feel supported and they leave when they feel devalued. Incivility is the subtle underminer that wears people down. Organisations suffer when they have to replace people who are good at their job but cannot tolerate a culture of incivility.
Rudeness remedies
Workplace incivility does not arise from one single factor. A multi-faceted approach must be taken if a culture of civility is to be nurtured, but taken together there are things that can be done to eradicate incivility and build a civil and flourishing organisation.
Respectful leaders
There is a plethora of research showing that leaders are essential in establishing a culture of civility in a workplace. One study done in collaboration with Harvard Business Review involved more than 20,000 workers from around the world and found that when workers feel respected by their leader, they have a greater sense of wellbeing and health. Leaders who exhibit respectful communication and behave with respect towards staff can build a civil workplace.
Clear cyber etiquette
Clear and concise guidelines for email interactions are vital to maintaining civility as email is an area where incivility can breed.
Face or phone
In a world where many teams are remote, encouraging face-to-face or phone meetings on a regular basis will help reduce the misunderstandings that can arise from email communication.
Manage resources and deadlines
Incivility arises when people are under pressure. Setting reasonable deadlines eases pressure. Providing adequate resources also reduces the burden for workers. Even if the resources may cost more up front, the savings from increased productivity will more than make up for any initial outlay.
This article is featured in WellBeing Magazine 223
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