Be Nice, or You’ll Make your Colleagues Sick -- Literally

Everyday forms of disrespect at your workplace are bad for you. Sandy Lim and her colleagues decided to take a closer look at “incivility”, which is low-intensity, norm-violating mistreatment of a fellow worker that is motivated by ambiguous intent. This is not merely a problem for the butt of the rudeness – it can operate at the group level. In other words, one person’s incivility to another can affect the well-being of the entire workgroup in which those two more direct participants are embedded.

The researchers found that, not surprisingly, incivility can affect job satisfaction, which can affect employees’ desire to leave the organization. Furthermore, they found that this rudeness can affect group members’ mental health, which in turn affects their physical health.

Thus, rude employees can not only make their colleagues unhappy and more likely to quit, they can literally make them sick, both mentally and physically.

I'll call your attention to the interaction among the various quadrants in the AQAL model -- individual employee behavior affecting attitudes, at both the individual and group levels, which in turn affect physical and mental well being, again at both the group and individual levels.

More wisdom into the interactions between interiors and exteriors and individuals and collectives of the workplace.

(From "Personal and Workgroup Incivility: Impact on Work and Health Outcomes,( by Lim, Cortina, and Magley, 2008, JAP 93(1), 95-107).