Free Excerpt: Introduction, The Cost of Bad Behavior

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            In 2003, David Trumbell landed a challenging, well-paying job with
a Fortune 500 telecommunications firm. Although the firm had
interviewed many qualified candidates, Dave’s enthusiasm and can-do spirit
made him the company’s first choice. Once he was on the job, Dave’s
prospects seemed bright. His new colleagues were sure that he would
succeed. Less than two months later, however, he left the firm. The
reason? Poor behavior—not his, but that of his new colleagues.
“Leaders ran around shouting at people,” Dave reported. “Employees took out
their frustrations on each other. It sure wasn’t what I was looking for in
a job. Who treats people that way?”

            American business has an incivility problem, and it’s getting worse.
Tune into interactions in many workplaces today and you’ll spot
employees speaking to subordinates in condescending tones, ignoring
e-mail or phone messages, claiming excessive credit for their team’s
accomplishments, browsing on their iPhones or texting during
meetings, and leaving malfunctioning office equipment for the next user to
fix. About one-fourth of workers we polled in 1998 said they were
treated rudely once or more per week; by 2005 that number had risen
to nearly half. An astonishing 95 percent of workers in 2005 reported
experiencing incivility from their coworkers. A recent Gallup study
entitled “Feeling Good Matters in the Workplace” found that 73 percent
of workers don’t “feel good.” Of the respondents to the Gallup poll,
14 percent say that they are actively disengaged as a result, and they
admitted to doing what they can to undermine their organizations and
their coworkers. The problem of incivility in the workplace has been
compounded by our increasing tolerance of nasty behavior as a culture.
Witness television shows like The Sopranos, films such as Borat or
Jackass, the phenomenon of road rage, or the never-ending parade of ugly
incidents at high school and sporting events.

            Few business leaders take the necessary steps to stop incivility.
Some don’t know how to do it, and most simply don’t understand how
much incivility is costing them. That’s where this book comes in.
Drawing on a decade of path-breaking research, The Cost of Bad Behavior
argues that petty incidences of workplace rudeness exact a staggering
economic toll that managers would be foolish to ignore.  

           Incivility’s measurable costs alone are enormous. Job stress, for
instance, costs US corporations three hundred billion dollars a year,
much of which has been shown to stem from workplace incivility. But
incivility’s true impact stretches far beyond that which is measurable in
dollar terms. How to tally damage done by increased employee
turnover, by the disruption of work teams, by the waning of helpful
behavior, or by the tarnishing of corporate and individual reputations? As our
research shows, incivility unleashes a set of complicated and
destructive dynamics on individuals, teams, and organizations that impede
performance and create organizational dysfunction on a number of levels,
leading to diminished financial results. Far from a minor inconvenience
to millions of American workers, workplace incivility is one of today’s
most substantial economic drains on American business, a largely
preventable ill that begs to be addressed.

Where We’re Coming From
            We’re not prim and proper manners crusaders. We’re business school
professors, one of us (Pearson) at the Thunderbird School of Global
Business, the other (Porath) at the University of Southern California.
We have devoted a good part of our careers to researching, writing,
consulting on, and teaching about the subject.

            We didn’t set out to study workplace incivility. What we wanted to
do, more than a decade ago, was identify workplace homicide’s early
warning signs. We suspected that disrespectful words and thoughtless
deeds among employees bore the seeds from which violence grows. To
our surprise, we found that although low-intensity bad behavior can
help explain violence, it hardly ever causes it. Our hypothesis didn’t pan
out, but we discovered something else: that expensive but largely
unseen side effects occur when one employee treats another in a
disrespectful way—that is, “uncivilly.”

           Serious costs associated with incivility existed in virtually every
organization that we studied. People who experienced incivility were
affected deeply, and nearly everyone took action to get even. Targeted
employees at all levels intentionally lowered their productivity, cut back
work hours, lost respect for their bosses, put in minimal acceptable
effort, and sometimes even left their jobs—all because of disrespectful
words or deeds. Yet uncivil behavior barely registered as damaging on
managers’ radar. How could this be? Simple: The organizations we
studied did not recognize the economic consequences of incivility, track
them, or include them in accounting tallies.

            What made the costs associated with incivility especially
noteworthy was another finding of ours: that incivility was far more widespread
than anybody had anticipated. Gathering experiences and observations
from eight hundred employees in the United States, we asked them:
Had incivility entered their interactions with their coworkers? The
answer was a resounding yes. One in five claimed to be the target of
incivility from a coworker at least once per week. About two-thirds told us
that they saw incivility occurring among other employees no less than
once a month. Ten percent said that they witnessed incivility among
their colleagues every single day.

            Initially, we wondered whether a me-first attitude on the part of
some American workers might have skewed their perspectives.
American workers, we thought, may have been too sensitive or demanding
about their treatment at work. To test our caveat, we went on to gather
views from across the border, where residents were perceived as less
self-centered and better mannered. We polled 125 white-collar
employees in Canada, asking them whether employee-to-employee
incivilities had entered their work lives. The answer, again, was a resounding
yes; in fact workplace experiences reported by Canadians were even
worse than those reported in our own country. Half of the Canadians
told us that they suffered incivility directly from their fellow employees
at least once per week. Ninety-nine percent said that they witnessed
incivility at work. One in four reported seeing incivility occurring
between other colleagues every day.

            If we had any lingering doubts that incivility was a widespread and
tremendously costly workplace phenomenon, these were finally
removed by the public response to our work. Within days of the first
media reports about our research, we were swamped with phone calls,
e-mail inquiries, and requests for interviews from reporters around the
globe. Our findings were covered in more than 450 newspapers and
magazines across the English-speaking world. Subsequent findings
prompted interviews with television and radio networks in the United
States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and France. We also received a flood
of queries from strangers who had been targets of incivility in their own
workplaces. Many told us about incidents that caused them to leave
their jobs. Some still felt as if they were held hostage, unable to continue
working at all. Some were relieved to learn that their strong reactions
to the “little” injustices of incivility were not unique.

           We didn’t anticipate the breadth and depth of responses that our
work had stirred, but this feedback only fueled us to dig deeper and
look closer. We’ve since spent a decade gathering data about workplace
incivility. We’ve interviewed employees, managers, executives, presidents,
and CEOs. We’ve administered questionnaires, run experiments,
led workshops, observed and consulted doctors, lawyers, law enforcement
officers, managers, and executives as they planned for and dealt
with contentious employees and clients. All told, we’ve gathered information
from more than nine thousand people nationwide. Participants
have told us about their uncivil experiences as targets, managers, leaders,
witnesses, and offenders. They’ve described how incivility unfolds,
how managers respond, how organizations react, how witnesses behave,
and how targets feel. They’ve even shared their very valuable insights
into how to curtail incivility, insights The Cost of Bad Behavior in turn
shares with you.

This Book’s Architecture
            We’ve written The Cost of Bad Behavior to be concise, easy to read, and
entertaining for managers and workers at all levels. We’ve also written
it to be compelling. You’ll encounter throughout a wealth of hard data
drawn from our research. We will speak forthrightly, and we will speak
from facts. We’ll tell you all that we have learned about workplace incivility
so that you can take a closer look at your own organization and
your own behavior. We’ll also go beyond the business world to fascinating
examples of rudeness, disregard, and disrespect from popular culture and
such fields as law, medicine, education, psychology, sociology,
communication, marketing, and criminology.

            The book is divided into three short sections. Chapters One through
Four introduce the phenomenon of incivility, describing its prevalence
and characteristics. Chapters Five through Eleven reveal incivility’s
costs: whom it hurts and how. Chapters Twelve through Seventeen
describe in detail what individuals, organizations, and society as a whole
can do to promote a civil environment. We’ve also included an Appendix
for those curious about the roots of incivility. Despite their diversities of era,
culture, and philosophy, historical figures as diverse as
Confucius, Plato, Montezuma, and Lincoln exalted the value of civility,
as you will see in the Epilogue. As readers will discover, some of these
actions are easy, and all are inexpensive when compared with incivility’s
tremendous costs.

           Nobody wins when it comes to incivility: not the firm, not the target
of incivility, not even the offender. Read this book, and you’ll come to
appreciate the hidden toll incivility takes in terms of reduced employee
performance, increased workplace stress, reduced employee retention,
reduced team performance, erosion of the firm’s culture, customer
flight, and damage to the firm’s reputation. Yet if the picture is grim,
companies are by no means doomed to suffer losses from incivility. You
have at hand right now the means to substantially reduce incivility and
minimize its damage. What you need is the will. To that end, we hope
you will come away from this book with one inescapable conclusion,
both for yourself and for your organization: There are costs for bad
behavior.