Willingness to Recommend: Does Workplace Incivility Actually Play a Role?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Willingness to Recommend: Does Workplace Incivility Actually Play a Role? Benjamin M. Walsh 1,2
&
Dana Kabat-Farr 3 & Russell A. Matthews 4 & Benjamin D. Schulte 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract To prevent workplace incivility, scholars encourage organizations to use reference checks to help eliminate uncivil applicants. However, under certain conditions, reference providers may be willing to recommend their rude colleagues for employment. We test this possibility by studying willingness to recommend, which captures a willingness to serve as a professional reference for a colleague. Based on signaling theory, we hypothesized that colleague incivility is negatively related to willingness to recommend, but this relationship is moderated by colleague in-role performance and job-level factors. In study 1, multilevel modeling of multisource data revealed that colleague incivility negatively related to willingness to recommend, but troublingly, this relationship was weaker among colleagues who were high rather than low performers, regardless of job-level moderators. In study 2, we tested whether organizations can intervene and encourage potential reference providers to pay greater attention to incivility. Regression results showed that providers placed greater weight on their colleague’s incivility in relation to willingness to recommend when signals were sent that the hiring organization was unwilling to sacrifice civility for top performance. Our research helps illuminate when incivility instigators are likely to be recommended for employment and demonstrates a way to maximize the use of reference checks for incivility prevention. Keywords Workplace incivility . Job performance . Reference checks . Willingness to recommend . Multilevel
Everyone knows a jerk at work—a colleague who engages in workplace incivility—the “rude, condescending, and ostracizing acts that violate workplace norms of mutual respect” (Cortina, Kabat-Farr, Magley, & Nelson, 2017, p. 299). Incivility is common and harmful (Schilpzand, De Pater, & Erez, 2016), even when not experienced personally (Lim, Cortina, & Magley, 2008). Incivility is also the tip of the iceberg; where it exists, we often see other forms of mistreatment such as sexual
We thank Sudeep Sharma for his constructive feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript, and Sheraz Ahmed for his coding assistance. The codebooks, data, syntax, and output for the project are available at https://osf.io/xkzr5/. * Benjamin M. Walsh [email protected] 1
Seidman College of Business, Grand Valley State University, 50 Front Ave. SW, Grand Rapids, MI 49504, USA
2
University of Illinois at Springfield, One University Plaza, Springfield, IL 62703, USA
3
Dalhousie University, 6299 South St, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2, Canada
4
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA
harassment (Lim & Cortina, 2005). Thus, employers need to prevent workplace incivility. One means to that end is the reference check, which comes in various for
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