The Regulating Role of Mindfulness in Enacted Workplace Incivility: An Experience Sampling Study

DOI

Incivility at work poses a problem, both for individuals who are the targets of incivility and for organizations. However, relatively little is known about what drives or hinders individuals to engage in incivility, and how they respond to their own uncivil behavior. Adopting a self-regulation perspective, we link theories explaining enacted incivility as self-regulatory failure with research about the self-regulatory benefits of mindfulness. We develop and investigate a conceptual model on the role of trait mindfulness in antecedent- and consequent-based processes of enacted workplace incivility. Data from an experience-sampling study across 5 work days provided support for the majority of our hypotheses. Individuals high in trait mindfulness not only showed generally low levels of enacted incivility, but they also displayed less variability in enacted incivility over time. Specifically, while enacted incivility was entrained to the workweek and systematically decreased from Monday to Friday for individuals low in mindfulness, enacted incivility remained stable over the course of the workweek for individuals high in mindfulness. Furthermore, employees high in trait mindfulness reacted in a more morally mature manner and experienced guilt when having engaged in uncivil behavior compared to their low mindful counterparts. However, increases in guilt for high mindful individuals did not translate into lower levels of enacted incivility the following workday.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/TN757C
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000824
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/TN757C
Provenance
Creator Hülsheger, U.R. ORCID logo; Van Gils, S. ORCID logo; Walkowiak, A. ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Hülsheger, U.R.; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2021
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact Hülsheger, U.R. (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type experimental data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav; application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size 5557; 26090; 54802; 13018
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences