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Who Is the Wolf and Who Is the Sheep? Toward a More Nuanced Understanding of Workplace Incivility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2018

Tine Köhler*
Affiliation:
Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business & Economics, The University of Melbourne
M. Gloria González-Morales
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The University of Guelph
Victor E. Sojo
Affiliation:
Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business & Economics, The University of Melbourne
Jesse E. Olsen
Affiliation:
Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business & Economics, The University of Melbourne
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tine Köhler, Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business & Economics, The University of Melbourne, 198 Berkeley Street, Level 10, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia. E-mail: tkoehler@unimelb.edu.au

Extract

Cortina, Rabelo, and Holland's (2018) perspective on studying victimization in organizations is a welcome contribution to workplace aggression research. We share their believe that considering a perpetrator predation paradigm may advance and proliferate research on issues related to gender harassment, bullying, mobbing, and other explicitly overt forms of victimization where the intent to harm is supposedly clear. However, we propose that, if blindly adopted, neither the dominant victim precipitation paradigm nor the suggested perpetrator predation paradigm will improve research on incivility or other more covert and indirect forms of victimization. In fact, we suggest in our commentary that both models may be counterproductive for understanding and remedying incivility in organizations.

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2018 

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