Trajectories of depletion following witnessing incivility toward women: a time-lagged study

• Date: 22 January 2024
• Pages: 740-755
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-06-2023-0184
• Published date: 22 January 2024
• Author: David F. Arena Jr.,Kristen P. Jones,Alex P. Lindsey,Isaac E. Sabat,Hayden T. DuBois,Shovna C. Tripathy

Trajectories of depletion following

witnessing incivility toward

women: a time-lagged study

David F. Arena Jr.

Department of Management, College of Business,

The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas, USA

Kristen P. Jones and Alex P. Lindsey

Department of Management, Fogelman College of Business and Economics,

The University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, USA

Isaac E. Sabat

Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

Hayden T. DuBois

Department of Management, College of Business,

The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas, USA, and

Shovna C. Tripathy

Department of Management, Fogelman College of Business and Economics,

The University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, USA

Abstract

Purpose –The authors aim to broaden the understanding of incivility through the lens of bystanders who

witness incivility toward women. Integrating attributional ambiguity and emotional contagion theories with

the literature on workplace mistreatment, the authors propose that witnessing incivility toward women may

negatively impact bystanders.

Design/methodology/approach –The authors collected multi-wave data from 324 employees to assess the

consequences of witnessing incivility toward women at work for bystanders.

Findings –Utilizing a serial mediation model, the authors found evidence that witnessing incivility toward

women indirectly increased turnover intentions six weeks later, first through elevated negative affect and then

through increased cognitive burnout.

Originality/value –Taken together, this study’s findings suggest that the negative effects of incivility

toward women can spread to bystanders and highlight the importance of considering individuals who are not

directly involved, but simply bear witness to incivility at work.

Keywords Bystanders, Incivility, Serial mediation

Paper type Research paper

The United States has fallen in their global ranking for national gender equality from 27th in

2022 to 43rd in 2023 (World Economic Forum, 2023). Considering this downward trend,

diversity issues pertaining to women at work have remained at the forefront of socio-political

discourse, especially within organizational contexts (Ammerman and Groysberg, 2021).

Scholars have conducted foundational work to shed light on how organizations can improve

women’s experiences as they navigate their professional lives (Grandey et al., 2020). While

this work has been important in understanding these experiences, it also has revealed that

EDI

43,4

740

Since submission of this article, the following author has updated their affiliation: Isaac E. Sabat is in the

Department of Psychology within the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of

Houston, Houston, Texas, USA.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-7149.htm

Received 2 June 2023

Revised 13 December 2023

3 January 2024

Accepted 4 January 2024

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 43 No. 4, 2024

pp. 740-755

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-06-2023-0184

mistreatment toward employed women persists and has potentially evolved into more subtle

and ambiguous forms.

While thiswork tends to focuson the impact of mistreatment on targetedwomen, our study

takes a more nuanced perspective. Specifically, we examine how witnessing (as compared to

directly experiencing)incivility toward womencan impact bystanders. We define incivility as

“low-intensity deviantbehavior withambiguous intentto harm the target, in violation of norms

for mutual respect”(Andersson and Pearson, 1999, p. 457). Incivility encompasses rude,

condescending, or discourteous behaviors that are low-intensity and have an ambiguous

intention to harm the target (Cortina et al., 2017). Examples of this behavior might include

gossiping about a colleague, interrupting a coworker, slow responses to communication, or

doubting another person’sjudgment(Pearson and Porath,2005). Our work builds on research

that has examined and theorized how instances of incivility can impact observers (Hershcovis

et al., 2017;Reichand Hershcovis,2015;Woolum et al., 2017) by focusing on how onlookers react

to a targeted form of incivility toward their female colleagues. We build on this work by

demonstratingthat the effects of witnessinga particulartype of gender discrimination,incivility

towardwomen, may be more far-reachingthan previously thought. To explorethe mechanisms

underlying these processes, we test a serial mediation model that estim ates the indirect effect of

witnessingincivility on bystander turnoverintentions six weeks later,first through a depletion

of emotionalresources (i.e. negativeaffect) and subsequently, a depletion of cognitiveresources

(i.e. cognitive burnout). As turnover can cost employees one-half to two times any given

employees’annual salary (McFeely and Wigert, 2019), understanding determinants and

mechanismsdriving voluntary turnover is important.

Our study contributes to existing organizational scholarship in two primary ways. First,

integrating behavioral and emotional contagion research (Foulk et al., 2016;Hatfield et al.,

1993) with the workplace mistreatment literature (Dhanani et al., 2018), we highlight the ripple

effects of witnessing incivility, explaining how the damaging consequences of incivility can

spread from targets to bystanders. Specifically, our research sheds light on the processes by

which witnessing incivility at work has downstream consequences for bystander turnover

intentions —starting with a depletion of affective resources which in turn triggers a

reduction in cognitive resources. Our focus on bystanders yields implications for a growing

body of work that has yet to fully reach consensus on the extent to which witnessing incivility

harms bystanders. While some evidence suggests that witnessing incivility is a relatively

benign experience for those who watch it unfold (Torkelson et al., 2016), other research

suggests that witnessing incivility takes a notable toll on critical work and health outcomes

(Holm et al., 2019;Holmvall and Sobhani, 2020;Oyet et al., 2020). That is, if people who simply

witness incivility are negatively affected by its occurrence, then this insidious form of

workplace mistreatment has the potential to harm all employees, not just targets, further

magnifying the importance of studying this phenomenon and resolving the aforementioned

ambiguity in the extant literature (Kabat-Farr et al., 2020).

Second, we contribute to an enhanced understanding of attributional ambiguity theory

(Crocker et al., 1991) by explaining how bystanders of ambiguously negative interactions

may experience similar strain and loss of resources (as compared to targets) in their attempts

to make sense of such situations. Indeed, scholars have argued that discerning the intention

underlying an ambiguously negative remark that is directed toward another person requires

a similar expenditure of resources compared to making sense of subtly negative

mistreatment directed toward oneself (Dhanani and LaPalme, 2019). Our work directly

responds to Miner and Cortina’s (2016) call for more research exploring explanatory

mechanisms underlying the relationship between gender-based mistreatment and workplace

outcomes. In doing so, we build on scholarship that has found evidence of an emotional

response to witnessed incivility (i.e. Porath et al., 2010;Reich and Hershcovis, 2015)to

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