Someone better start working on a vaccine against workplace rudeness

It’s worse than we thought. Workplace rudeness isn’t just corrosive — it’s catching.  

Alisson Clark, writing on the University of Florida website, reports that a recent U of F study indicates that encountering rude behavior at work makes people more likely to perceive rudeness in later interactions.

The perception makes them more likely to be impolite in return, spreading rudeness like a virus, she says.

“When you experience rudeness, it makes rudeness more noticeable,” Clark quotes lead author Trevor Foulk, a doctoral student in management at UF’s Warrington College of Business Administration. “You’ll see more rudeness even if it’s not there.”

The study findings were recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The researchers say they’re the first  hard evidence that everyday impoliteness spreads in the workplace.

The study tracked 90 graduate students practicing negotiation with classmates. Those who rated their initial negotiation partner as rude were more likely to be rated as rude by a subsequent partner, showing that they passed along the first partner’s rudeness. The effect continued even when a week elapsed between the first and second negotiations.

Second-hand rudeness?

Rudeness directed at others can also prime our brains to detect discourtesy, Clark said.

Foulk and his co-authors, fellow doctoral student Andrew Woolum and UF management professor Amir Erez, tested how quickly 47 undergraduate students could identify which words in a list were real and which were nonsense words. Before the exercise began, participants observed one of two staged interactions between an apologetic late-arriving participant and the study leader. When the leader was rude to the latecomer, the participants identified rude words on the list as real words significantly faster than participants who had observed the neutral interaction.

The impact of secondhand rudeness didn’t stop there, however: Just like those who experience rudeness firsthand, people who witness it were more likely to be rude to others. When study participants watched a video of a rude workplace interaction, then answered a fictitious customer email that was neutral in tone, they were more likely to be hostile in their responses than those who viewed a polite interaction before responding.

“Part of the problem is that we are generally tolerant of these behaviors, but they’re actually really harmful,” Foulk said. “Rudeness has an incredibly powerful negative effect on the workplace.”