Don't take that tone with me! An examination of attribution and evaluation as a consequence of incivility perceived in workplace email
Date
2022
Authors
Goldman, Chloe B., author
Fisher, Gwenith, advisor
Cleveland, Jeanette, committee member
Henle, Chris, committee member
Long, Ziyu, committee member
Prince, Mark, committee member
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Abstract
This research investigated how people in the workforce interpret and react to the experience of incivility when it is perceived in workplace email. The purpose of this study was to assess relationships between perceptions of incivility in email, the fundamental attribution error, and associated judgments made about the email content and sender. Moreover, this work examined the similarity-attraction paradigm to test whether perceptions of similarity to the email sender moderated the aforementioned relationships. In this vignette-based survey, participants were asked to evaluate email content in the context of hypothetical workplace scenarios. These participants were recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce pool (MTurk), resulting in a final sample of 219 respondents. Results indicated that people make the fundamental attribution error more often when perceptions of incivility are high, and that perceiving incivility is associated with a poorer evaluation of the email sender's communication skills and with a lower desire to work with that email sender in the future. In addition, participants who perceived themselves to be more similar to the email sender evaluated the email sender positively even when they detected incivility. Findings in this study do not support that the perception of incivility or attribution was related to email content ambiguity or cognitive load. This work contributes empirical evidence to research about email and computer mediated communication (CMC) in organizations and the pitfalls of miscommunication or misinterpretation on lean media platforms. Implications for workplace training and organizational policy change are discussed.
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Embargo Expires: 05/24/2024