There have been several completed outcomes and one outcome still in progress for the project entitled “In/Civility Workshop: Transdisciplinary Collaborations and Community Responses.” Completed outcomes include: 1) a concluded two day workshop on incivility research, experience, and next steps, 2) a Slack workspace to continue post-workshop activities and collaborations, 3) a collaborative theoretical paper in a top management journal. The one outcome that was disrupted by the pandemic was the creation of a post-workshop report that would be made available to the public: this outcome is anticipated for no later than spring 2022.

1. Most notably, the workshop achieved several core aims. First and most importantly, it created spaces for both calling in and healthy conflict. Indigenous scholars pointed out the problematic history of the terms “civility” and “incivility,” where several scholars of color also pointed out how calls to “civility” were more often a type of tone policing leveraged against people with less power. Another point of discussion was around the use of restorative practices, rehabilitation, and apology. Historically rehabilitation and apology have been used to support the reentry of powerful people back into the workplace without actual rehabilitation or restitution towards harmed parties. Therefore while restorative practices have a place in transforming workplaces, they need to be used in a way that satisfies victims and organizational communities.
   
   This leads to our third major finding in the workshop, which is that we need to broaden who we consider both “harming” and “harmed” parties. The “harming” party needs to include not only the individual committing acts of disrespect or harassment towards a colleague, student, or community member, but also the institution/institution members who were complicit in the behavior, the training process, and/or the investigation or restoration process. The “harmed” party is not just the single person victimized in a moment of disrespect or harassment but the bystanders or witnesses, community members, and others whose sense of trust and ease at work is disrupted by a hostile workplace environment.
   
   
2. The Slack workspace has created an environment where administrators, scholars, victims, organizations, and funding agencies can come together to discuss issues of disrespect in the workplace, offer resources, and better listen to each other.
   
   
3. In early 2021 Lilia Cortina, Sandy Hershcovis, and Kathryn Clancy published a paper “The Embodiment of Insult: A Theory of Biobehavioral Response to Workplace Incivility” in the Journal of Management. This was a multiyear effort to create a major theoretical contribution to the study of workplace incivility, and integrate both psychological and anthropological thinking into the field. Therefore this paper represents one of the major aims of the workshop, which was to encourage more transdisciplinary work in the study of incivility.
   
   Not only was a footnote making the organizational psychology community better aware of the history of the term “incivility” directly inspired by the workshop, several elements of the collaboration and its theorizing were strengthened by both workshop attendance and workshop findings. This paper makes a novel contribution to the study of workplace incivility by demonstrating how the “uncivil moment” is not the only point of harm, but also the relational responses available to the targeted person. In workplaces where affiliation and restitution are normalized the target can engage the person who harmed them and work out their issues. In workplaces where only escalation or avoidance are possible the targeted person is either isolated or forced to retaliate to “save face.”

The broader impacts of this workshop were to gather together a diverse set of faculty, students, staff, and other applied scholars, as well as organize the workshop in a way that would inspire new ways of engagement in other scholarly settings. Two of the structural components of this workshop were especially novel: the use of Liberating Structures active learning activities, and the creating of a listening room for people who need to take a break and discuss their reactions or feelings in a safe setting with a professional. The listening room has now been replicated in other settings, including a Safety in Field Sciences workshop and a National Academies workshop. Our creation of community guidelines at the start of the workshop (and sharing of the outline of the activity) has also been disseminated for others to use.

Last Modified: 11/29/2021
Modified by: Kathryn B Clancy