Suffering doubly: How victims of coworker incivility risk poor performance ratings by responding with organizational deviance, unless they leverage ingratiation skills

ABSTRACT

Building on conservation of resources theory, this study investigates the relationship between employees’ exposure to coworker incivility and their job performance ratings, while also considering the mediating role of their deviant work behaviors and the moderating role of their ingratiation skills. Results based on multisource, three-wave data from employees and their supervisors in Pakistani organizations show that disrespectful coworker treatment diminishes employees’ performance evaluations, because they seek purposefully to cause harm to their employing organization, as a way to vent their frustrations. This mediating role of organizational deviance is mitigated to the extent that employees have a greater ability to ingratiate with others though. This study accordingly identifies a key mechanism – deviant work behaviors that undermine organizational well-being – through which coworker incivility leads to negative performance consequences, and it reveals how organizations can subdue this process by honing pertinent personal resources within their ranks.

KEYWORDS:

• Coworker incivility
• organizational deviance
• job performance ratings
• ingratiation skills
• conservation of resources theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/85uzb/

Notes

1. Our focus on ingratiation skills – and not stable personality traits such as the Big Five, trait anxiety, or trait positive or negative affectivity, for example, – is especially relevant because organizations can nurture such skills, which are malleable and not predetermined.

2. The study materials are available at https://osf.io/85uzb.

3. In line with existing recommendations for dealing with control variables that are not significant (Becker, 2005; Bernerth & Aguinis, 2016), as was the case for gender (Table 2), we undertook a robustness check by rerunning the Process macro without gender. The hypothesis results were completely consistent with those that resulted when we included gender as a control variable.

4. Consistent with our theoretical framework, we estimate a model that includes a moderating effect of ingratiation skills on the relationship between coworker incivility and organizational deviance but not between organizational deviance and job performance. A post hoc analysis affirmed that ingratiation skills did not significantly moderate the relationship between organizational deviance and job performance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muhammad Umer Azeem

Muhammad Umer Azeem is Associate Professor in the School of Business and Economics at University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. His research interests are in organizational behavior and human resource management.

Dirk De Clercq

Dirk De Clercq is Professor of Management in the Goodman School of Business at Brock University, Canada. He is also Research Professor in the Small Business Research Centre at Kingston University, UK. His research interests are in entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and cross-country studies.

Inam Ul Haq

Inam Ul Haq is Associate Professor in the School of Business at Monash University, Malaysia. His research interests are in employee stress, attitudes and behaviors.