Date of Award

1-1-2014

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Public Administration and Policy

Content Description

1 online resource (x, 184 pages) : illustrations (some color)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Sue R. Faerman

Committee Members

David P. McCaffrey, Michael T. Ford

Keywords

Displaced aggression, Incivility, Multifoci, Public service motivation, Target similarity, Tit-for-tat, Courtesy in the workplace, Work environment, Organizational behavior, Interpersonal conflict

Subject Categories

Business Administration, Management, and Operations | Organizational Behavior and Theory | Public Administration

Abstract

Despite the scholarly interest in workplace incivility in the field of organizational behavior, public administration (PA) scholars have paid much less attention to this timely and relevant topic. Based on a unique sample of 401 individuals (nested in 83 work units) employed in a public organization in Thailand, the present study seeks to address this void by examining whether different sources of workplace incivility (i.e., supervisors, coworkers and customers) will have differential effects on different types of employee deviant behaviors (i.e., deviance directed towards the organization, supervisors, coworkers and customers). Based on a multifoci and target-specificity framework, the present study predicted that employees would not only respond to the source of perceived incivility by engaging in target-specific interpersonal aggression (a tit-for-tat argument), but they would also displace aggression onto targets other than the source of incivility (a displaced aggression argument). Moreover, this study proposed that employees who have high levels of prosocial orientation would be less likely to respond to workplace incivility with deviant behaviors. In particular, two measures of prosocial orientation were proposed as potential moderators: (1) public service motivation (PSM) and (2) agreeableness.

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