Workplace incivility, psychological distress, and the protective effect of co-worker support
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Previous in-depth focus groups found that postal workers employed by a crown corporation in Canada identified a lack of respect in the workplace. A lack of respect or discourteous behavior might be better understood as a phenomenon of workplace incivility. The purpose of this paper is to report a larger cross-sectional survey to determine: the magnitude of workplace incivility among Canadian postal workers; any association between incivility and indicators of worker well-being; and, the potential buffering benefits of social support from co-workers. Design/methodology/approach Questionnaire packages were mailed to nearly 2,000 employees of Canada Post Corporation, asking for anonymous responses to questions about their job, demographics, satisfaction and commitment, treatment in the workplace, and well-being. Findings More than 82 percent of 950 respondents reported at least some workplace incivility. After controlling for demographic and work factors, incivility explained significant variation in worker burnout, anxiety, depression, and hostility (i.e. adjusted R2 values ranged from 5 to 46). In addition, the association between incivility and worker anxiety, depression, and hostility was reduced when workers reported greater social support from co-workers. Research limitations/implications Incivility is more than just a minor or infrequent source of psychological distress for people working in service. However, a positive outcome is that co-worker support helps reduce the adverse effects of rude and discourteous behavior. Originality/value To our knowledge, this was the first large-scale survey exploring workplace incivility in the public postal service. The data from a large sample of postal workers across Canada suggest that the treatment of employees is an ongoing problem at this organization. This research is relevant for understanding workplace interactions and health in the service sector in Canada, though the authors expect it is germane also to other occupations worldwide.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".