Incivility is counterproductive on a lot of fronts and here’s one more reason: It’s bad for business.
It’s Unfair : Why Customers Who Merely Observe an Uncivil Employee Abandon the Company, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Service Research (JSR), found that:
Incivility between employees… may harm the firm from a services marketing standpoint—when customers witness it. When customers observe a boss belittling a subordinate, a salesperson making a sarcastic remark about a fellow employee, or a customer service representative using a derogatory term to describe another employee, customers’ evaluations of the firm’s other employees and the firm itself may suffer. Moreover, witnessing employee incivility may make customers reluctant to do business with the company again, or worse, desire to get back at the company for its poor treatment of employees.
According to the authors Christine Porath of the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and Deborah MacInnis and Valerie S. Folkes of the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, customers witnessing incivility “are not only angry at the perpetrator but are more likely to seek revenge against the perpetrator and the firm,” by talking about the uncivil encounter with others and reducing their patronage.
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