By Xing Wang, Tae-Yeol Kim and Hongli Li

Do you agonise over getting the tone of a work email ‘just right’ before you send it? Have you ever laid awake at night, your mind furiously dissecting every word and nuance of an email you received from a colleague, trying to decide if it was meant to be disrespectful or not? If so, you’re not alone – tone and content matter greatly in online communication when it comes to creating or avoiding workplace conflict. Cyber incivility (i.e., low-intensity deviant behaviours that violate workplace norms via online communication) is a common problem in modern organisations, but very little is known about how significantly it impacts our ability to perform at work.

A recent study we conducted addressed this gap by focusing on how cyber incivility acts as a workplace stressor and how employees respond to it. Specifically, we analysed how employees react to incidents of uncivil emails or online messages in terms of how it affected their workplace performance on the day of the incident as well as during the following day. The time-lag effect is important here because work-related conflict can undermine the relaxation and sleep initiation processes necessary for a good night’s sleep. Consequently, employees may remember uncivil incidents from earlier that day as they prepare for sleep. They may even engage in ‘sense-making attempts,’ keeping them awake for longer and reducing their cognitive abilities the following day.

After conducting a survey-based pilot and main study involving 112 full-time employees in China (spanning a wide range of industries and roles), we found that:

• Incidents of cyber incivility impaired employees’ work performance the following day, but generally not due to reduced sleep quality.
• Employees’ performance was impaired due to an induced negative affect (i.e., the negative psychological feeling associated with failing to achieve a goal, avoid a threat, or a general dissatisfaction with one’s current state of affairs).
• Induced negative affect, and its subsequent negative impact on workplace performance, was significantly lower in employees with strong self-leadership (i.e., those with the ability to control their own behaviour, influence and ‘lead themselves’ through the use of specific sets of behavioural and cognitive strategies).

While rude or insensitive emails may not be causing as many sleepless nights as we had hypothesised, it is clear that cyber incivility does negatively impact workplace performance in various insidious ways. Induced negative affect may cause employees to be distracted hours or days after a given incident, as they replay it, mentally dissect it, and experience a range of negative emotions (confusion, frustration, etc.) because of it.

This highlights the pressing need for employers to pay more attention to cyber incivility and create practical solutions for reducing such incidents across their organisation. This is especially important for organisations where employees rely heavily on online communication methods. A clear, consistent and enforceable set of online etiquette policies, rules, and relevant intervention programmes is the ideal place to start.

The broader aim of implementing organisations should be to promote civility, respect and consideration across the workforce. Leaders and employees should be explicitly encouraged (and trained, if necessary) to avoid ambiguity and insensitivity in their emails, while also responding to requests in as timely a manner as possible.

Equally importantly, our findings also show that employees can minimise the negative impact of cyber incivility if they are able to exhibit self-leadership. Employers can help individual employees find and harness their ability to self-lead, by offering training that introduces behaviour-focused strategies, natural reward strategies, and constructive thought pattern strategies. Employers may also wish to adjust their recruitment policy to give greater weight to self-leadership capabilities when hiring.

This article refers to the study entitled “Why and for whom cyber incivility affects task performance? Exploring the intrapersonal processes and a personal boundary condition” published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Management here.

Xing Wang is a doctoral candidate at the College of Business Administration, University of Illinois. Tae-Yeol Kim is the Philips Chair and Professor of Management at CEIBS. Hongli Li is a Professor at the School of Education, Soochow University.