When we are rude at work, we usually respond in kind. As a result, such behavior spreads in the team like a virus.
Researchers at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration conducted an experiment with 90 graduate students. They were given the task of holding “negotiations” with each other. Those who felt their partner’s behavior was not correct enough themselves more often behaved inappropriately with the next “client”. Moreover, a similar effect persisted, even if the second negotiations took place a week after the first. In another experiment, the researchers gave 47 students a test that asked them to distinguish real words from a nonsensical set of letters as quickly as possible. Before the start, the students became unwitting witnesses of the staged scene between the “late participant” and the leader of the experiment. One group of students saw that the leader rudely reprimanded the latecomer, in another case he behaved neutrally. Students who observed rudeness were much faster in recognizing rude words in text as real. This shows that when we observe such behavior from the outside, our ability to recognize rudeness sharpens.
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In the third experiment, it was demonstrated that the rudeness of another person not only sharpens our perception, but also provokes us to similar behavior. The students were asked to compose a response to an email from a hypothetical “client” written in a neutral style. Some of them had previously watched a video of a rough skirmish between colleagues in the workplace. As a result, their responses to the letter were more aggressive than those of the students who watched the video with polite communication.
All this leads to the fact that rudeness spreads through the work team like a virus: a person encounters rudeness, begins to see it everywhere, behaves rudely himself, which causes the same reaction from colleagues. “The problem is that we are too tolerant of such manifestations,” said Trevor Foulk, lead author of the study. “Meanwhile, they cause enormous harm to the atmosphere in the team and, as a result, can significantly reduce labor productivity.”
Подробнее см. Т. Foulk et al. «Catching Rudeness Is Like Catching a Cold: The Contagion Effects of Low-Intensity Negative Behaviors», Journal of Applied Psychology, June 2015.