Employment law attorney Michael P. Maslanka reviews the book The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It by Christine Pearson and Christine Porath.
I’ve been reading an interesting book, The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It
Pearson and Porath note that a lot of incivility is caused by how employment relationships are now structured. They aren’t long-term relationships, but transaction-based ones, lasting for a limited time and then — poof! — they’re over. Employees therefore ask themselves: If my job is going to change, why should I expend the energy to be polite and decent? In a transaction-based workplace, civility takes time, and time is in short supply. Today’s colleague is tomorrow’s competitor. Move on.
Even in more permanent employment relationships, incivility festers. That was really brought home for me not long ago. A good friend of mine said she told her bosses that her husband was very ill, he might lose his hearing, and she would need to be away from work. She’s in a managerial position, so the company would be affected. I ran into her a few weeks ago at the grocery store. She said that the two bosses she mentioned her husband’s illness to never asked her about him. Not, “How’s he doing?” or “Is there anything we can do to help?” Not a single word. Total indifference, complete radio silence. To them, she’s just a fungible economic unit. That should be fixed — because it’s the human thing to do, and it’s also good business.
Pearson and Porath argue that the small things about civility matter, and they matter a lot. They cite an experiment in which two groups were asked to unscramble words. The words in one group all related to politeness, while the words in the second group all related to rudeness. The conduct of the participants was monitored. Guess what? The subjects required to unscramble words in the “polite” group acted politely, and those who had to unscramble words in the “rude” group acted rudely. In other words, people can be primed to act in certain ways, and that priming is up to us as managers and as employees. We can create a civil workplace or an uncivil one.
And remember, if you’re rude, an apology goes a long way. Duke professor of behavioral economics Dan Ariely ran an interesting experiment. An actor meets with two groups of people chosen at random from a coffee shop. The people in each group receive a piece of paper with letters on it and are told to find matching pairs. There’s a monetary prize for completing the task, and they’ll sign a receipt when they get the money. But there’s a twist.
One group is the “no-annoyance” group, and the other is the “annoyance” group. With the annoyance group, the actor interrupts his explanation of the project by talking on his cell phone with a “friend,” and he makes no apologies for the interruption. The group members are then overpaid by several dollars. Only 14 percent returned the extra money. The no-annoyance group got the explanation without an interruption, and 45 percent of them returned the money.
But Ariely adds yet another twist, having a third group to whom the actor apologizes for the interruption. The percentage of people in the annoyance group (with apology) returning the money? Forty-five percent, just like in the no-annoyance group. Treat your employees rudely, and not only will they be rude, but they also will be tempted to steal from you in a variety of ways. Apologize quickly for your rudeness, and they’re much less likely to hurt you back.
If you’d like to keep up in the area of cognitive psychology, there’s a great website that I like to visit at www.scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily. Some of the articles relate directly to employment law and HR; they’re worth a read.
Michael Maslanka is the managing partner of Ford & Harrison LLP’s Dallas, Texas, office. He has 20 years of experience in litigation and trial
of employment law cases and has served as Adjunct Counsel to a Fortune 10 company where he provided multi-state counseling on employment matters. He has also served as a Field Attorney for the National Labor Relations Board.
Mike is listed in The Best Lawyers in America and was selected as a “Texas Super Lawyer” by Texas Monthly and Law & Politics Magazine in 2003. He was also selected as one of the best lawyers in Dallas by “D” Magazine in 2003. Mike has served as the Chief Author and Editor of the Texas Employment Law Letter since 1990. He also authors the “Work Matters” column for Texas Lawyer.
You can reach him at mmaslanka@fordharrison.com.