This article originally appeared in Communication Intelligence Magazine on March 22,2023. You can access it directly here
A new Georgetown University study reports that 70% of employees witness workplace incivility at least two to three times a month.
“It’s past time for leaders everywhere to acknowledge that respectful leadership — and fostering a respectful culture — are absolute business imperatives,” says Gregg Ward, the founder and executive director at the Center for Respectful Leadership and author of Restoring Respect.
As for why incivility occurs as frequently as the Georgetown study discovered is still a little mysterious.
“I wish I had a simple answer for you as to why we’re seeing so much more incivility now,” Ward says. “I can tell you that there’s a lot of research that indicates that since the Great Recession, work in general has become significantly more complicated and stressful and we’re all operating in what many organizational experts call VUCA — volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous— business environments all the time rather than just now and then.”
And to few people’s surprise, “The pandemic only made the situation much, much worse,” he says.
That stress has created a highly problematic byproduct.
“There’s an old saying, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” which may be true. But I would add that, ‘When the going gets tough, people get tough on each other,” Ward claims.
