From civility to culture: why workplace incivility is an organisational design issue
- Sadhbh O'Flaherty
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 10 hours ago
Across this series, I’ve explored what workplace incivility is, why it matters, and how we respond to it.
One conclusion I wanted to illustrate clearly is that incivility is rarely resolved through individual effort alone. It is shaped, sustained, and sometimes amplified by the organisational systems that surround it.
Research has shown that incivility is costly to organisations and their members in subtle but pervasive ways that can include a decline in job satisfaction, fading of organisational loyalty, and loss of leadership impact.
This matters because many organisations still treat incivility as an interpersonal problem, something to be managed through resilience and professionalism. A problem that can be solved by just having a conversation.
While well intentioned, this framing often places the burden on individuals and overlooks a more uncomfortable truth: incivility persists when organisational conditions allow it to.
The question, then, is not simply
“how do people behave?” but “what does the system make possible and/or reward?”
Incivility is deeply sensitive to context.
Policies may exist, values may be articulated, and training may be delivered yet everyday experiences remain unchanged.
What’s missing is not intent, but alignment: between stated values and lived experience, between leadership expectations and leadership behaviour, and between how organisations respond formally and how we experience things informally.
From my work in this space, one pattern emerged consistently.
Organisations that make meaningful progress tend to shift their focus away from the isolated incidents of incivility and towards respect as a cultural condition rather than an individual behaviour issue.
This perspective is echoed in a 2025 systematic review by Yaqoob et al., of 76 empirical studies spanning 24 years of workplace incivility research, which concluded that lasting progress depends less on individual resilience and more on leadership behaviour, organisational norms, and system design.
Instead of asking who is at fault in any particular situation, organisations and their leaders need to ask different, more systemic questions like;
“What actually happens, in practice, when disrespect occurs?” and
“which behaviours are quietly tolerated because challenging them feels risky, uncomfortable, or inconvenient?”.
This shift in questioning often marks the difference between organisations that address incivility at a surface level with those who want to change and are actively changing the conditions that allow it to persist.
These questions don’t have universal answers either - incivility is experienced differently across teams, roles, and levels of power. That is why off-the-shelf solutions so often fall short.
One senior leader I spoke to in my research prided themselves on how well they managed instances of incivility among their teams and how important this was to them. Yet, when faced with an uncivil leader themselves, only one level above them in their organisation, they found it very difficult to manage, feeling all the negative impacts associated with being disrespected at work.
Ironically, despite their strong experience of dealing with incivility, they felt powerless to do anything about it due to the cultural norms at the top of the organisation.
Meaningful progress requires organisations to first understand their own incivility landscape - how it shows up, how people respond to it, and how leadership actions shape those responses.
Workplace Incivility is a signal to your organisation's health
At Inspiring Change, we see incivility as a signal rather than a symptom. It points to deeper questions about culture, leadership, and organisational design. Addressing it well means creating the conditions where respect is not just encouraged but expected; not just spoken about but practised; and not just modelled at the top but through accountability that is reinforced throughout the system.
Civility isn’t about being nice. It’s about protecting dignity, enabling performance, and creating workplaces where people can do their best work without expending energy on self-protection.
If this series has prompted reflection or surfaced questions about what may be happening beneath the surface in your organisation the next step is not a quick fix - it’s a conversation. Because understanding incivility is the first step. Designing the conditions to stop it from spreading is the work that follows.
Work with our team
Civility isn’t just kindness, it’s a strategic lever for engagement, retention, and wellbeing. The question is not whether incivility exists, but whether you are willing to design systems that stop it from spreading.
At Inspiring Change, we support organisations to diagnose incivility, understand its cultural drivers, and design responses that are grounded in evidence and lived experience. If you’d like to talk, get in touch at hello@inspiringchange.ie.
References:
Andersson, L. M., & Pearson, C. M. (1999). Tit for Tat? The Spiraling Effect of Incivility in the Workplace. Academy of Management Review, 24(3), 452–471.
Cortina, L. M. (2008). Unseen Injustice: Incivility as Modern Discrimination in Organizations. The Academy of Management Review, 33(1), 55–75.
Han, S., Harold, C. M., Oh, I.-S., Kim, J. K., & Agolli, A. (2022). A meta-analysis integrating 20 years of workplace incivility research: Antecedents, consequences, and boundary conditions. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 43(3), 497–523. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2568
Miner, K. N., Settles, I. H., Pratt-Hyatt, J. S., & Brady, C. C. (2012). Experiencing Incivility in Organizations: The Buffering Effects of Emotional and Organizational Support1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42(2), 340–372. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00891.x
Yao, J., Lim, S., Guo, C. Y., Ou, A. Y., & Ng, J. W. X. (2022). Experienced incivility in the workplace: A meta-analytical review of its construct validity and nomological network. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(2), 193–220. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000870
Yaqoob, Samina & Shahzad, Khuram & Faisal, Muhammad & Kitchlew, Naveda & Abualigah, Ahmad. (2025). Why, how, and when incivility unfolds in the workplace: a 24-year systematic literature review. Management Review Quarterly. 10.1007/s11301-025-00525-5.
