Percy Hughes & Roberts Solicitors

We all know what a detrimental impact a colleague's rudeness and incivility can have on an employee’s performance but here’s something that all employers/employees should be aware of:-

An article in the Daily Mail discloses how a colleague’s rudeness can have a great impact on relationships far beyond the workplace, according to researchers.

Stress created by incivility can be so intense that, at the end of the day, it is taken home by the worker and impacts the well-being of his or her family and partner.  This can cause a chain reaction whereby they then take the stress to their own workplace.

Lead researcher Merideth J Ferguson, of Baylor University in Texas, said: 'Employees who experience such incivility at work bring home the stress, negative emotion and perceived ostracism that results from those experiences.

'This affects more than their family life - it also creates problems for the partner's life at work.'

Since the employee comes home more stressed and distracted, the partner is likely to pick up more of the family responsibilities, and those demands may interfere with the partner's work life.

Researchers surveyed 190 workers and their partners. Workers were employed full time, had co-workers and had an employed partner who agreed to complete an online survey.  After completing the survey, workers were asked to have their partners complete a separate survey.

The combined responses from the initial contact and the partner constituted one complete response in the database.  Approximately 57 per cent of the employee sample was male with an average age of 36, while 43 per cent of the partner sample was male with an average age of 35. Of these couples, 75 per cent had children living with them.

Dr Ferguson said: 'Unlike the study of incivility's effects at work, the study of its impact on the family is in its infancy.

'However, these findings emphasise the notion that organisations must realise the far-reaching effects of co-worker incivility and its impact on employees and their families.

This research underlines the importance of stopping incivility before it starts so that the ripple effect of incivility does not impact the employee's family and potentially inflict further damage beyond the workplace where the incivility took place and cross over into the workplace of the partner.'

The research is published in Journal of Organizational Behaviour.  The article is published in the Daily Mail.