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

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.