How cool is your workplace? A fellow worker's rudeness can be so intense that it could ruin your personal life,scientists say. Researchers at Baylor University in Texas found that stress created by incivility can impact the well-being of the the workers' family and their partner. Since the person comes home more stressed and distracted,the partner is likely to pick up more of the family responsibilities,and those demands may interfere with the partner's work life,the researchers found. Such stress,they said,also significantly affected the worker's and the partner's marital satisfaction,the Daily Mail reported. Lead researcher Merideth Ferguson said: "Employees who experience such incivility at work bring home the stress,negative emotion and perceived ostracism that results from those experiences. "This affects more than their family life - it also creates problems for the partner's life at work." For the study,published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior,the researchers surveyed 190 workers and their partners. Workers were employed full time,had co-workers and had an employed partner who agreed to complete an online survey. After completing the survey,workers were asked to have their partners complete a separate survey. The combined responses from the initial contact and the partner constituted one complete response in the database. Approximately 57 per cent of the employee sample was male with an average age of 36 years,while 43 per cent of the partner sample was male with an average age of 35 years. Of these couples,75 per cent had children living with them. Dr Ferguson said: "Unlike the study of incivility's effects at work,the study of its impact on the family is in its infancy. "However,these findings emphasise the notion that organisations must realise the far-reaching effects of co-worker incivility and its impact on employees and their families. "One approach to prevent this stress might be to encourage workers to seek support through their organisation's employee assistance programme or other resources such as counselling or stress management so that tactics or mechanisms for buffering the effect of incivility's stress on the family can be identified." This research,she added,underlined the importance of stopping incivility before it starts so that the ripple effect of incivility "does not impact the employee's family and potentially inflict further damage beyond the workplace where the incivility took place and cross over into the workplace of the partner."
