Shedding Light on the Dark Side of the Organization: Frontline Employees’ Perception of Workplace Incivility

Abstract

Given the different norms across cultures, industries, and organizations, every workplace accepts a number of shared moral understandings as to its own respect norms among the members. However, in today’s global workplace, behavior has more nuances due to the speed and complexity of interpersonal interactions. Workplace incivility is a notable example of a unique form of interpersonal mistreatment in the organization with its low intensity and ambiguous intention of harming the target. With the aim of contributing to the current knowledge, the main purpose of this thesis is to provide a better understanding of workplace incivility perception among frontline employees in the service industry context. Turnover, on the other hand, is a big issue in the tourism and hospitality sectors that results in excessive costs for recruiting and training service employees. As an important source of job stress caused by negative interpersonal interactions, workplace incivility could be a critical antecedent of employees’ turnover. Therefore, the other purpose of this thesis is to shed more light on the employees’ responses to workplace incivility in terms of turnover intentions. Moreover, the current thesis is also aimed to investigate the role of a positive working environment, as environmental factors, as well as individual differences, as personal factors, in the perception of workplace incivility and its effect on turnover intention. This thesis consists of one systematic review and meta-analysis study, one quantitative empirical paper, and one exploratory paper. Firstly, in line with the purpose of the thesis, a deep review of the workplace incivility literature, in twenty years period, was conducted to provide an early meta-analysis of the relationship between employees’ perceptions of workplace incivility and their turnover intentions in the first paper. This paper investigated the consistency of the incivility–turnover relationship across different sources of workplace incivility (i.e., customer, coworker, supervisor incivility), as well as incivility measures, industries, and countries. The results from the first paper confirm a significant positive relationship between workplace incivility (regardless of the source) and employees’ turnover intention. Following up on this result, the second paper aims to examine to what extent the working environment can affect frontline employees’ perception of workplace incivility and their turnover intentions in the hotel and restaurant industry in Norway. In this quantitative paper, the effect of a perceived caring climate, as an environmental factor, on employees’ turnover intention through a serial multiple mediation model including coworker incivility and emotional exhaustion. The result of the structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis reveals that the perception of caring climate in the workplace has not only a direct negative effect on turnover intention but also has indirect effects through a reduction in both coworker incivility and emotional exhaustion. This result emphasizes the important role of environmental factors in the workplace (i.e., caring climate) in employees’ perceptions of incivility and their responses in terms of turnover intention. Given the same sample set, the third paper is an exploratory study that looks at individual differences as personal factors in the perception of workplace incivility, social supports at work, and intention to turnover through applying cluster analysis. Specifically, this study explores if it is possible to identify distinct groups of employees that perceive and behave differently from other groups. The results of K-means cluster analysis and one-way ANOVA indicate three different clusters/groups of frontline employees with different demographic and behavioral profiles. Taken together, the findings of the present thesis provide valuable insights into our knowledge about the incivility–turnover relationship in service work environments, as well as a better understanding of the role of environmental and personal factors in such a relationship.