This blog is the first in a two-part series, where Gemma delves into incivility and the impact it has on workplace culture.
There’s a quiet crisis happening in organisations across the world. It doesn’t show up in a profit and loss statement, it rarely makes the agenda at board meetings, and yet it’s one of the most corrosive forces in working life today. It’s called incivility and it might be costing your organisation more than you think.
What do we mean by incivility?
Incivility isn’t always a shouting match or a dramatic act of cruelty. More often, it’s the rolled eye in a meeting, the email reply that’s a little too curt, the colleague who talks over you, the manager who forgets to say thank you or the senior leader who dismisses an idea before it’s finished being spoken.
Christine Porath, one of the foremost researchers on workplace civility, defines incivility as ‘low-intensity deviant behaviour with ambiguous intent to harm’. The ambiguity is what makes it so insidious. The perpetrator can always claim they didn’t mean anything by it whilst the recipient is left wondering if they’re being oversensitive. And so, it festers, becoming a normalised behaviour that permeates the culture of the organisation.
Research consistently shows that most employees have experienced incivility at work, and a significant number report being on the receiving end on a weekly basis. Yet it remains one of the most underreported and undertreated issues in organisational life.
Civility Saves Lives: lessons from the NHS
Perhaps no sector has grappled with the consequences of workplace incivility more honestly, or more urgently, than healthcare. The NHS Civility Saves Lives campaign, championed by Chris Turner and Joe Farmer, makes a stark and evidence-based case: ‘rudeness doesn’t just damage morale, it costs lives’.
The campaign is research-based, drawing on the findings of Professor Peter Bamberger, amongst others, which found that teams exposed to rude behaviour before performing complex medical tasks showed significant deterioration in their performance. In clinical settings, this means diagnostic errors, procedural mistakes and failures of teamwork at the moments that matter most.
The mechanism is straightforward: when we feel belittled or threatened, our brain enters a state of threat response. Cognitive bandwidth narrows, and we become less creative, less collaborative and less able to process complex information. A snide comment from a senior colleague before a ward round or a dismissive remark in a handover can impair the performance of the entire team, not just the individual on the receiving end.
The NHS Civility Saves Lives programme also highlights the ‘bystander effect’: incivility is contagious. Teams that witness rude behaviour, even if not directed at them, show reduced performance. Silence in the face of incivility is not neutrality, it implies tacit permission and is equally as damaging.
The lesson for organisations beyond healthcare is profound. If rudeness can degrade performance in a surgical team, what is it doing to your product team, your customer service staff, your finance department? The stakes may be different, but the mechanism is the same.
Psychological safety: a potential antidote
In the late 1990s, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson set out to study whether better-performing hospital teams made fewer medical errors. Her findings changed how we think about high-performing teams forever.
The best teams, she found, didn’t make fewer errors. They reported more of them. Why? Because they worked in environments where it was safe to speak up, admit mistakes and raise concerns without fear of humiliation or punishment. Edmondson called this ‘psychological safety’. The shared belief that the team is a safe place for interpersonal risk-taking.
Psychological safety is not about being nice for the sake of it, nor is it about avoiding all conflict or challenge. Edmondson is clear on this, it’s about creating the conditions in which people can bring their full intelligence to work. A team high in psychological safety can debate fiercely, challenge ideas robustly and hold each other to high standards, precisely because they trust the interpersonal environment.
Incivility is the direct enemy of psychological safety. Every act of belittlement, dismissal or contempt sends a signal to everyone in the room: it isn’t safe to speak here. People learn quickly. They don’t flag the problem they’ve spotted or raise new and creative ideas that they’ve thought of, for fear of the response they might receive and instead they stay silent. The team stops performing as well, and the organisation misses out on potential innovation whilst the individual becomes less engaged and invested in the workplace.
Google’s landmark Project Aristotle, which studied hundreds of internal teams to identify what made them effective, reached the same conclusion: psychological safety was the single most important factor in team performance. It’s interesting to reflect on how safe you currently feel in your team. Would you be happy to speak out directly, or are you careful in what you say in order to protect yourself?
Come back next week to see how incivility connects to employee engagement and how it all fits with leadership, with some tips on where to start.