The Influence of Workplace Incivility on Employee Turnover Intentions: Evidence from Service Organizations

Abstract

A comparative research design was used to examine the relationship between workplace incivility and employees' job intention to quit in service organizations. They were split into three categories based on the amount of incivility their employees experienced at their workplace: low, moderate, and high. The data that were collected were obtained by distributing an anonymous questionnaire with standardized instruments used to measure workplace incivility and intention to leave, to 312 employees in various service organizations. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey's honestly significant difference (HSD) post hoc tests were used to compare the turnover intentions between the three incivility groups, and effect-size statistics were reported to elucidate the magnitude of the observed differences. Results showed that there was a significant, progressive difference between each group in terms of turnover intention, and between each group and all of the others, through post hoc comparisons. The size of the difference equaled a large effect size, which means the difference in employees' turnover intentions explained a significant amount of variance in incivility exposure in the workplace. The results indicate that moderate incivility is significantly and practically related to employees' intentions to leave their organizations, which has implications for the monitoring and management of the interpersonal mistreatment among employees for service organizations.