You cannot leave it at the office: Spillover and crossover of coworker incivility

Abstract

SummaryThis study examines the spillover and crossover effects of a specific chronic stressor, coworker incivility, on target marital satisfaction, partner marital satisfaction, and partner family-to-work conflict and on how the transmission of stress from the workplace to the family domain (as perceived by the target's partner) mediates these relationships. Using a matched data set of 190 job incumbents and their partners, the findings reveal that coworker incivility demonstrates both spillover and crossover effects on these outcomes important to the family. Evidence indicates that incivility targets do not leave the stress of incivility at work but instead bring it home to the family domain where it influences relationships with and outcomes of their partners. Implications of these findings and avenues for future research are discussed.

Love won’t tear us apart but work might: How job stressors relate to constructive and destructive reactions to one’s romantic partner’s negative behavior.

“…Finally, we controlled for negative affect to rule out the possibility that negative mood spillover (Eby, Maher, & Butts, 2010;Judge & Ilies, 2004) causes the link between job stressors and accommodation. Other studies (Ferguson, 2012;Restubog et al, 2011) have already shown negative emotional states to mediate the effect of job stressors on undermining social interaction at home. We measured negative affect with negative-affect items from the PANAS (Krohne, Egloff, Kohlmann, & Tausch, 1996;Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988).…”

Work, stress, and relationships: The crossover process model

“…Evidence has demonstrated that concepts including incivility (Ferguson, 2012), work harassment (Dionisi & Barling, 2015), emotional exhaustion (Wirtz, Rigotti, Otto, & Loeb, 2017), resilience (Chen, Westman, & Hobfoll, 2015), and burnout and work engagement (Westman & Chen, 2017) can also be transmitted via an interpersonal crossover process. Evidence has demonstrated that concepts including incivility (Ferguson, 2012), work harassment (Dionisi & Barling, 2015), emotional exhaustion (Wirtz, Rigotti, Otto, & Loeb, 2017), resilience (Chen, Westman, & Hobfoll, 2015), and burnout and work engagement (Westman & Chen, 2017) can also be transmitted via an interpersonal crossover process.…”

Spillover and crossover of sex-based harassment from work to home: Supervisor gender harassment affects romantic relationship functioning via targets' anger

“…For example, Story and Repetti's () daily diary study showed that spouses report greater marital anger and withdrawal following negative social interactions with coworkers and supervisors. Moreover, being the target of workplace incivility or abusive supervision is positively associated with work–family conflict (Lim & Lee, ), family undermining (Wu, Kwan, Liu, & Resick, ), and negative perceptions of one's marital relationship (Ferguson, ).…”

“…For example, one partner's job demands and levels of work–family conflict predict the other partner's home demands, degree of exhaustion, withdrawal behavior, and family–work conflict (Bakker, Demerouti, & Dollard, ; Hammer, Bauer, & Grandey, ). Even more pertinent to the current study, incivility influences both the marital satisfaction and the family‐to‐work conflict of targets' partners via work‐based stress (Ferguson, ), while the psychological distress resulting from workplace aggression increases the psychological distress of victims' romantic partners (Haines et al, ). Similarly, abusive supervision contributes to relationship tension, which in turn, diminishes the perception of family functioning for targets' partners (Carlson, Ferguson, Perrewé, & Whitten, ).…”