A Multi-Level Study Investigating the Impact of Workplace Civility Climate on Incivility and Employee Well-Being

• Main Author: Ottinot, Raymond Charles
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholar Commons 2010
• Subjects: work place climate; Employee Well-Being; Rudeness; Workplace Safety; American Studies; Arts and Humanities; Psychology
• Online Access: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3537; http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4732&context=etd

This study used Zohar‟s (2000) multi-level model of climate to examine the extent to which shared perceptions of workplace civility climate relate to teacher job satisfaction, affective commitment, and counterproductive work behaviors (CWB-abuse) towards other teachers. Workplace civility climate is defined as employee perceptions of how management uses policies, procedures, and practices to maintain a civil workplace. An online-survey was used to assess a cross-sectional sample of K-12 teachers (N = 2222) nested in 207 schools in a large US school district. There was adequate agreement among teacher perceptions of school civility climate for aggregation and between-group variance of civility climate among schools. The results of hierarchical linear models revealed school-level civility climate perceptions were significantly negatively associated with lower levels of teacher experienced incivility, CWB-abuse and associated with higher levels job satisfaction and affective commitment, thus supporting four out of five hypotheses. However, school-level civility climate did not function as a moderator of the relationship between a teacher‟s experience of incivility and acts of CWB-abuse towards other teachers. The findings of this study provide evidence that shared perceptions of civility climate are associated with higher levels of individual-level employee well-being.