Nobody files a formal complaint about a sigh. Workplace incivility is the eye-roll during your update, the reply that arrives three words long, the greeting that stops at your desk and starts again at the next one. Each moment is small enough to feel silly to raise, which is exactly why it keeps happening.
This guide is for managers who can feel something is wrong in the team but cannot name a single incident serious enough to act on. It explains what incivility is, how it differs from bullying, what the research actually shows, and the practical steps you can take this month. It is general information, not legal advice.
What This Guide Covers
- What Is Workplace Incivility? A Simple Definition
- Incivility vs Bullying: Why They Are Not the Same
- The Six Common Forms of Workplace Incivility
- What the Research Says
- Signs Your Team Has an Incivility Problem
- How to Stop Workplace Incivility: 8 Practices for Managers
- Incivility and Your WHS Duty of Care
- Common Myths About Workplace Incivility
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Where to Start
What Is Workplace Incivility? A Simple Definition
Workplace incivility is low-intensity rude or disrespectful behaviour where the intent to harm is ambiguous. It breaks the ordinary courtesies a workplace runs on, but it is deniable. The person can always say they were busy, blunt, or having a bad day.
That ambiguity is the defining feature. Bullying announces itself eventually. Incivility can run for years while everybody involved quietly wonders whether they are imagining it. Researchers Christine Porath and Christine Pearson, who have studied the behaviour for two decades, describe its cost in The Price of Incivility, and their findings are unusually blunt about how much ordinary rudeness takes out of a business.
The everyday version looks unremarkable. Being spoken over. Being left off the invitation. Being corrected in front of the room when a quiet word would have done. None of it would survive a written complaint, and all of it lands.
Incivility vs Bullying: Why They Are Not the Same
Bullying, in the Australian definition, is repeated unreasonable behaviour directed at a worker that creates a risk to health and safety. It has a target, a pattern and usually a clear power dynamic. Incivility often has none of those things in a form you could document.
The difference matters for how you respond. A bullying allegation triggers a formal process. An incivility problem will fail a formal process, because no single incident will meet the threshold, and the person who raised it will then be the one who looks difficult.
Managers get stuck here. They wait for behaviour serious enough to investigate, and while they wait, the norm settles. Incivility is not a smaller version of bullying to be tolerated until it grows up. It is a separate problem requiring a different tool: culture and norm-setting, not investigation.
It is also contagious in a way bullying is not. Most people who behave rudely at work are not cruel. They are copying what they have seen tolerated, or passing along what was done to them an hour ago.
The Six Common Forms of Workplace Incivility
1. Interrupting and talking over
The same people finish their sentences in every meeting and the same people do not. Over months, the quieter half stops preparing, because preparation has stopped changing anything.
2. Exclusion from information
Someone is left off the thread, the invitation, the corridor conversation where the decision was actually made. It is rarely deliberate and it is always noticed. Exclusion is the form that most reliably produces a person who feels alone in a crowded office, which is a distinct experience from the difference between loneliness and aloneness.
3. Public correction
Feedback that could have been given privately is delivered in front of the team instead. The content may be fair. The setting turns it into something else, and everyone watching learns to take fewer risks.
4. Digital curtness
A one-word reply. A question ignored for a week and then answered abruptly. Being copied to a manager on something that did not need escalating. Remote and hybrid work has made this the most common form of all, because tone does not survive the trip.
5. Credit-taking and blame-shifting
Someone else’s idea is repeated as one’s own, or a shared mistake is quietly narrowed to one name. It breeds a particular resentment that people find hard to admit to, close to the feeling described in why am I so jealous and how can I stop.
6. Withdrawal of ordinary courtesy
No greeting. No thank you. No acknowledgement that a person walked into the room. This is the hardest form to raise, because the offence is entirely in what is absent.
What the Research Says
Porath and Pearson surveyed thousands of workers across industries about how they responded after being treated rudely at work. Among those who had been on the receiving end, 48 per cent deliberately decreased their work effort, 38 per cent deliberately decreased the quality of their work, and 47 per cent deliberately decreased the time they spent at work.
Eighty per cent lost work time worrying about the incident, and 12 per cent left their job because of it. None of that shows up as an incident. It shows up as productivity, attrition and a manager wondering why a capable team has gone flat.
In Australia, the regulatory frame is clearer than many managers realise. Safe Work Australia’s Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work names poor workplace relationships and harmful behaviours as psychosocial hazards that a person conducting a business must identify and control, so far as is reasonably practicable.
The international standard ISO 45003 takes the same view, treating workplace relationships as a managed risk rather than a matter of personality. We look at what that means in practice in why ISO 45003 is important for your business.
Signs Your Team Has an Incivility Problem
- Meetings have gone quiet. People bring updates and not opinions, and disagreement happens afterwards in smaller rooms.
- The same two or three names come up whenever someone mentions being frustrated, but no one will put anything in writing.
- Requests between teams have become formal. People copy managers on things that used to be a two-line message.
- New starters go quiet around week six, after the initial welcome wears off and the real norms become visible.
- Your exit interviews mention culture, tone or “not feeling valued” rather than pay or workload.
- Small errors are hidden until they are expensive, because owning up costs more than the mistake.
- Sick leave has crept up without an obvious cause, and it clusters in one part of the team.
None of these is proof, and none of them is a diagnosis of anything in an individual. They are signals worth a closer look. If someone on your team is distressed, point them to your EAP or a GP rather than trying to counsel them yourself.
How to Stop Workplace Incivility: 8 Practices for Managers
- Name the standard out loud. Most teams have never agreed what respectful looks like here. Spend twenty minutes writing three or four specific behaviours the team will hold to, in their words, not HR’s.
- Watch your own tone first. Teams calibrate to the manager. Your rushed reply at 7pm sets the norm faster than any policy, and a manager working at the edge of their capacity is the most likely source of curtness. Our guide to how to avoid burnout is a reasonable place to start with yourself.
- Intervene in the moment, lightly. “Hang on, Priya hadn’t finished” costs you two seconds and teaches the room more than a memo. The lighter the correction, the more often you can use it.
- Make the private conversation specific. Describe the behaviour, the setting and the effect, not the personality. “In Tuesday’s meeting you cut across Sam twice” can be discussed. “You’re dismissive” cannot.
- Fix the conditions that produce rudeness. Unclear priorities, impossible deadlines and chronic understaffing manufacture short tempers. Addressing workload is often more effective than addressing manners, and the case for that is set out in the benefits of wellbeing in the workplace.
- Write the digital rules down. Agree response times, when to pick up the phone instead, and who gets copied in. Most digital incivility is habit rather than hostility, and habits respond to rules.
- Give people a way to raise small things. If the only channel is a formal complaint, you will hear about nothing until it is serious. A standing question in one-to-ones works: is there anything happening in the team that is wearing you down?
- Support your managers properly. Middle managers are asked to hold a standard nobody trained them to hold. External support helps, and we explore that in the value of coaching in the workplace.
For anyone carrying the effects home, the ordinary recovery practices matter more than they sound. Sleep is usually the first casualty, which is why we wrote about dealing with insomnia in the workplace, and a few minutes of breathwork for stress and anxiety before a difficult meeting is not a cure but it steadies the hands.
Incivility and Your WHS Duty of Care
Under Australian WHS law, a business must eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable. That duty does not begin at the point where behaviour becomes bullying. It begins where a hazard is reasonably foreseeable, and sustained incivility in a team is foreseeable once you know about it.
Practically, this means treating it like any other risk. Identify it through surveys, one-to-ones and exit data. Assess how often it happens, to whom, and how severe the effects look. Control it by changing conditions, not just by talking to individuals. Review whether it worked.
Keep a record of what you noticed and what you did. Not to build a case against anybody, but because a duty of care is demonstrated by action taken, not by good intentions. If a complaint does escalate later, a documented history of proportionate steps is what shows the duty was taken seriously.
This is general information rather than legal advice, and your obligations vary by state. If you are unsure where your responsibilities sit, get advice. We set out the broader business case in your team’s mental health is your business.
Common Myths About Workplace Incivility
It is just a personality clash. Personality clashes are mutual and usually contained. Incivility runs in one direction, spreads to onlookers and follows the same people between teams. If two people cannot work together, that is a clash. If one person leaves a trail, that is a pattern.
