News
The Impact Of Rudeness In The Morning
People perceive more workplace rudeness when exposed to notions of rudeness at the start of the day.
A US-based team headed by Andrew Woolum of the University of North Carolina recruited 81 people from an executive MBA course who worked in roles ranging from security, medicine and business. The participants completed surveys twice daily for ten consecutive workdays: they recorded their mood when they woke up, and in the evening they described the experiences they’d had at work that day.
According to the researchers, threat-related concepts, if presented during (and particularly at the beginning of) a waking cycle, activate a network of related concepts and make it easier for subsequent events to become interpreted in the context of this threat.
However, not all participants were as susceptible to these effects as others. The participants had completed a questionnaire measure of “core self-evaluation”, which taps into multiple qualities related to confidence and emotional stability: self-esteem, self-efficacy (feeling capable), locus of control (feeling in control of one’s life) and lower neuroticism.
There’s evidence that this constellation of traits prevents people becoming strongly affected by threatening social stimuli, and this was borne out in the results: those one standard deviation higher in core self-evaluation were immune from the rudeness manipulation, neither perceiving more rudeness during their workday.
But here we see that simply being exposed to rudeness in the abstract can sensitise you to experience it: seek and you shall find.
The findings suggest wise managers should take into account that team members lacking confidence may be especially vulnerable to a spiral of negative effects when exposed to habitual rudeness. For all of us, the study provides a reminder that we are participants in, not merely subjects of, our social existence. That’s good news, because it gives us more say in how it turns out.
A US-based team headed by Andrew Woolum of the University of North Carolina recruited 81 people from an executive MBA course who worked in roles ranging from security, medicine and business. The participants completed surveys twice daily for ten consecutive workdays: they recorded their mood when they woke up, and in the evening they described the experiences they’d had at work that day.
According to the researchers, threat-related concepts, if presented during (and particularly at the beginning of) a waking cycle, activate a network of related concepts and make it easier for subsequent events to become interpreted in the context of this threat.
However, not all participants were as susceptible to these effects as others. The participants had completed a questionnaire measure of “core self-evaluation”, which taps into multiple qualities related to confidence and emotional stability: self-esteem, self-efficacy (feeling capable), locus of control (feeling in control of one’s life) and lower neuroticism.
There’s evidence that this constellation of traits prevents people becoming strongly affected by threatening social stimuli, and this was borne out in the results: those one standard deviation higher in core self-evaluation were immune from the rudeness manipulation, neither perceiving more rudeness during their workday.
But here we see that simply being exposed to rudeness in the abstract can sensitise you to experience it: seek and you shall find.
The findings suggest wise managers should take into account that team members lacking confidence may be especially vulnerable to a spiral of negative effects when exposed to habitual rudeness. For all of us, the study provides a reminder that we are participants in, not merely subjects of, our social existence. That’s good news, because it gives us more say in how it turns out.