Is it the Person or the Place? A Meta-Analytic Test of the Antecedents of Experienced Workplace Incivility

Lindsay Y. Dhanani, Amanda M. Wolcott, Andrew Pueschel

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

The current meta-analysis sought to summarize the empirical evidence on the antecedents of workplace incivility and was guided by two theoretical explanations of the occurrence of incivility. The first theory, the victim precipitation model, implicates victim dispositional characteristics as antecedents of incivility by arguing that victims contribute to or provoke incivility through displaying certain traits or behaviors. The second perspective posits that characteristics of the working environment can encourage or discourage uncivil behaviors among coworkers. As shown by the meta-analysis, both victim dispositional traits and situational variables contributed to experiences of workplace incivility. A test of the relative contribution of the antecedents to the prediction of incivility revealed that the situational antecedents accounted for more variance in incivility in comparison to the victim dispositional antecedents. Finally, the relationship between incivility and the situational antecedents remained stronger than the relationship between incivility and the dispositional antecedents even after controlling for a number of potentially confounding methodological variables. The implications for each of the theoretical perspectives is discussed.

Original languageAmerican English
Pages (from-to)892-897
Number of pages6
JournalAcademy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings
Volume2019
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2019

Article

Amanda Wolcott's name changed to Amanda Main in 2019.

Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings includes abstracts of all papers and symposia presented at the annual conference, plus 6-page abridged versions of the “Best Papers” accepted for inclusion in the program (approximately 10%). Papers published in the Proceedings are abridged because presenting papers at their full length could preclude subsequent journal publication. Please contact the author(s) directly for the full papers.

Cite this