It Happened, or You Thought It Happened? Examining the Perception of Workplace Incivility Based on Personality Characteristics

Although workplace incivility has become increasingly researched in recent years, little is known about the degree to which individual differences affect both the perception and experience of incivility. The current study sought to determine whether personality characteristics were predictive of perceptions of incivility. A total of 708 undergraduates from a large Midwestern university were exposed to a series of vignettes describing behaviors that could potentially be perceived as uncivil, and were asked to rate the degree to which each of these were perceived as rude. Results indicated that agree-ableness, emotional stability, and openness were negatively related to perceptions of incivility, whereas positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and trait anger were positively related to perceptions of incivility. When all personality variables were analyzed together, PA and trait anger explained the most variance in incivility perceptions, whereas NA was no longer significant in this model. In an exploratory analysis, we also found that supervisor-perpetrated incivility was perceived as more uncivil than coworker or customer incivility. Implications of these findings for future incivility research are discussed.