Workplace Rudeness
January 25th, 2008 by Cali & Jody
We were excited to see this University of Florida study, or at least as excited as you can be about a thoughtful, scientific exploration of how people use their power and position in the workplace to take a complete crap on other people’s dignity.
The main takeaway from the study is that after being treated rudely, subjects didn’t perform as well as controls when tackling various cognitive tasks. But what jumped out at us is something that we have been observing in the workplace for a long time: even when people simply imagine being on the business end of toxic behavior, it negatively affects their performance.
In other words, your boss doesn’t even have to yell at you for being five minutes late for you to feel oppressed by a work culture that puts the clock ahead of results. As long as those beliefs about time are in place, your mind takes care of the rest.
As Amir Erez, the professor who led the study notes, “As more and more jobs within organizations become increasingly complex and require higher levels of cognitive functioning and creativity, anything that interferes with that process is likely to have an impact, not only on individual job performance but on the productivity of the labor force as a whole.”
Keep this in mind the next time you hear a manager at your organization say something like “late again?” or “nice of you to join us” or “well, look who’s here.” Even the most off-handed comment can do more damage than you might realize.
Plus, that’s like, so totally rude.
I am glad that this toxic behavior at work is gaining awareness. The place where I work is full of politics which affect the employees’ performance. This environment is encouraged by Management and Human Resources. Supervisors have the option of making the employee fail. This action gives them the leverage to manipulate their performance at the end of the year and justify bad performance, low raises, putting them on probation, and dismissals.
This is a display of power and abuse. This is sad because at the end of the day, everybody loses.
I believe that we need the change that Cali and Jody are offering. ROWE is the answer, a place in which only results are important, a place in which the employee owns his/her time without any kind of judgments.
Cali and Jody, thank you for opening my eyes and making me realize that this toxic environment is not normal, it is disfunctional and it needs to be changed. I cannot wait to read your book “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It”. I hope my company looks at it and implements this valuable and powerful change.
Doesn’t that cut both ways though? If we have a team meeting and I ask everyone to be in the office by noon and one guy shows up at 12:30 thus wasting everyone’s time, isn’t that also rude?
thanks for sharing such a great study.
a different way to think about this is that we - as the recipients of rudeness - care too much about what others think. i’m not dismissing the impact of rudeness, rather calling out the fact that we (again, the recipients) allow it to affect us.
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I worked in the civil service for a woman who believed she was god above all of us. She ruled by creating fear in her employees. Her two boss-minions who reported to her, reported on us directly to her. I was the target of her behaviour for a year and a half. I felt unheard by welfare and by HR - this was a no-win situation. I moved sideways eventually, then after another two years left the service completely, and fell into depression. That job and that woman changed my life. I have moved on, I don’t accept that treatment any more from anyone. And I never ever will work in the civil service again.