Exploring the impact of workplace incivility on psychological safety and leadership succession in higher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study investigates the impact of workplace incivility on the psychologically safe climate (PSC) and leadership succession within higher education (HE) institutions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with academic leaders across four universities, it examines how incivility influences leadership pathways. The findings reveal that incivility significantly undermines PSC, which is essential for fostering trust and encouraging interpersonal risk-taking. Participants described incivility as a normalized aspect of academic culture, with digital communication serving as a key amplifier of uncivil interactions. Additionally, the study highlights the disproportionate impact of incivility on equity-seeking and early-career faculty. The erosion of PSC disrupted collaboration, undermined morale, and deterred faculty from pursuing leadership roles, thereby exacerbating existing challenges in the leadership pipeline. This study advances the understanding of how incivility and weakened PSC interact to impede leadership succession in HE. The findings underscore the critical need for institutions to adopt proactive measures, including clear behavioral guidelines, leadership training initiatives, and sustained efforts to cultivate PSC as a foundational element of academic governance. This research contributes to the growing scholarship on sustainable work environments, highlighting the urgent need for systemic interventions that support leadership pipelines, strengthen institutional resilience, and foster inclusive and adaptive academic cultures.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".