How Rude!

Think about the last time you witnessed someone being rude at work. Did it make you feel uncomfortable? Provoked? Angry? Did it have a negative affect on your job performance, or how you feel about your peers?
A coaching client recently told me that one of his coworkers rudely blasted him in an email about an initiative he was implementing. Adding insult to injury, the email was cc’d to others. My client was shocked…and he felt betrayed and unmotivated to move forward. This is a valuable reminder that how we treat our colleagues has a significant effect on our engagement with work.
Unfortunately, the odds are pretty good that you’ll see someone being rude in the workplace; for up to 25% of employees, it’s a daily occurrence. A 2009 study conducted by researchers from the University of Southern California and University of Florida investigated how witnessing mistreatment influences work performance. They focused on how individuals behave after seeing a co-worker experience mistreatment or rudeness, concentrating on whether it affected their task performance, creativity and/or citizenship behavior.
The study found that witnessing rudeness from a superior or peer affects performance on routine and creative tasks, and also reduces citizenship behavior. It can actually increase anti-social thoughts and behaviors, as a way of enacting revenge. It’s still not clear whether rudeness reduces effort or affects cognition, but it sure does impair the outcome!
These results could be extremely important, as they suggest the possibility that observing rudeness can be a starting point to a spiral of distaste and aggression toward the workplace or colleagues. Maybe our kindergarten teachers were right…a little common courtesy isn’t such a bad idea!
Porath, C.L. &Erez, A. (2009). Overlooked but not untouched: How rudeness reduces onlookers’ performance on routine and creative tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109, 29-44.