The Impact of Personality Traits and Conflict Management Styles on Workplace Incivility and its Relation to Employee’s Embarrassment and Belongingness

Employees of today's organizations experience more unpleasant behaviors than in the past. One of the types of mistreatments that has recently been the focus of attention by researchers is workplace incivility. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of personality traits (five-factor model) and conflict management styles on workplace incivility. The current study also examines the impact of workplace incivility on employees' sense of embarrassment and belongingness as consequences of workplace incivility.

The current study is a survey study with a sample of 650 employees of Maskan Bank offices in Tehran. The sampling method is available and for assessing workplace cruelty, from the Cortina et al. (2001) questionnaire, conflict management styles, from the Rahim & Magner questionnaire (1995), personality traits, from the Saucier questionnaire (1994), the embarrassment, from the Leary, Landel & Patton questionnaire (1996) and Belongingness were used by the Godard questionnaire (2001).

The findings of the study indicate that emotional stability, extraversion and conscientiousness have the most effect on jworkplace incivility, respectively. Also among conflict management styles, domination, compromise and integration have the most impact on workplace incivility, respectively. In addition, the results indicate that workplace incivility has a positive effect on employee’s sense of embarrassment and a negative impact on their sense of belongingness.

The current study adds to the existing knowledge in the field of organizational behavior and also shows that by controlling a priori factors, it can reduce workplace incivility and prevent its undesirable consequences.