Mind your manners

The Cost of Bad Behaviour
How incivility is damaging your business and what to do about it
By Christine Pearson and Christine Porath

It’s a mean old world. Cynicism and disrespect characterise public debate. Old-fashioned courtesies are seen as just that. The meek do not inherit the earth – they get crushed in the stampede being led by the aggressively ambitious.

Is any of this surprising? People are worried about their jobs and economic livelihoods. In their anxiety, many will look after number one. Is this really such a problem?

The authors of this new book say that it is. Christine Pearson, a professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona, and Christine Porath, assistant professor at the Marshall School of Business in California, have been studying the impact of bad behaviour for more than a decade.

Their conclusion? Incivility, as they label it, is doing untold commercial damage to many businesses. It is not just that life would be nicer if everybody were nicer. Businesses would be more successful, too.

What is incivility? It is, according to this book, “the exchange of seemingly inconsequential, inconsiderate words and deeds that violate conventional norms of workplace conduct”. That casts the net pretty wide. Indeed, a list of examples of incivility printed at the start of the book appears to locate this argument in rather banal territory.

“Acting irritated when someone asks a favour” is one of them. So are “spreading rumours about colleagues”, “failing to return phone calls or respond to e-mails” and “leaving a mess for others to clean up”. If this is incivility, there are a lot of uncivil workplaces out there.

But, bit by bit, the authors make a strong case that cumulative rudeness or unpleasantness, whatever you call it, does damage the bottom line and should not be tolerated.

Why is there more incivility than in the past? Partly it reflects social change, and the more abrasive, less automatically deferential relationships people often have with each other today. But there are economic factors at work here as well.

Less permanent working arrangements undermine stability. “Skilled employees ... build their own career paths and establish their relationships with employers on their own terms. One consequence is that employees have become more accustomed to getting what they want and more uncivil when they don’t,” the authors say. “When workplace relationships become transactional rather than loyalty based, civility can seem like a giant waste of time.”

But how do the authors know that incivility has a financial impact? Because they have actually tried to cost it. Once you start to consider the consequences, the hidden costs become more apparent. The commitment of those on the receiving end of unpleasantness diminishes. They spend more time worrying. They reduce the time they spend at work. They criticise their employer to their friends and family. They try less hard. They look for other jobs. And sometimes they leave, taking their experience and contacts with them.

“Unhappy flight attendants told us that they spent their flight time sitting in the back of the plane reading magazines, and disgruntled ramp workers recalled how they disappeared to sleep in the maintenance shack until the next plane arrived,” Profs Pearson and Porath say. It is obvious how this sort of staff dissatisfaction, brought about by incivility, can undermine customer service and the performance of a business.

Do any companies have a better story to tell? Cisco is the first organisation the authors know of to have introduced a formal training programme based on civility. Managers at Starbucks are encouraged to monitor staff behaviour and report anything that is in conflict with the company’s founding principles.

If this reviewer can enter an uncivil note, the book is a bit short of ideas on what the victims of unpleasantness should do about it. They argue against fighting back in kind. But their other suggestions – including, simply, “leave” – are a little underwhelming. There is also little acknowledgement of the fact that some workplaces, and some businesses, seem to survive and even thrive in an atmosphere of incivility.

But these are relatively minor criticisms. The big point of this book is valid. Rudeness may be slowly killing your business. It is time to stamp it out.

From Financial Times July 29 2009