Research Highlight: YoungAh Park
One of the hottest subjects online and in social media is employee stress in the workplace. With the arrival of Professor YoungAh Park last year, LER has a resident expert in this subject area.
Professor Park is currently conducting a study about workplace stress sparked by incivility manifested through email. Workplace incivility refers to rude, inconsiderate behavior and comments to others. With the increasing use of email, however, it has become harder and harder to gauge the intent of the instigator. Was the incivility intentional?
Email incivility is a relatively minor form of workplace interpersonal mistreatment and generally has no legal ramifications, but is increasingly pervasive as most communication transfers to electronic means. With no nonverbal cues to accompany the messages and time lag between the sending and receiving of the messages, it becomes even more ambiguous. Emotions are harder to “see,” and even neutral content can be seen as negative.
If employees experience negativity at the end of the work due to frequent email incivility, these feelings may bleed into workers’ personal and home lives and evening activities, causing more persistent effects than originally thought. As workers are more connected, reading email on phones and tablets during personal time can compound the effect. Virtual teams, global workforces, and telecommuters who rely on email communications may be more prone to perceiving email incivility. Clearly, email is the easiest way to disseminate information, but is it the best way?
Park suggests that these are the precise reasons why it is important to pick up the phone, or conduct remote meetings via video whenever possible. Bringing nonverbal cues, verbal tone, and eye contact back into the communication can reduce uncertainty and calm suspicions surrounding suspected incivility.
Other options to reduce this phenomenon, and hence reduce workplace stress, include clear policies for email communications, better training, supervisor modeling of acceptable behavior, and strong encouragement to focus on personal lives when at home with families. Additionally, workers with good job autonomy, decision-making authority, and the ability to take breaks when needed are generally better able to deal with perceived email incivility. Park has learned that workers with high job control generally don’t feel as much stress from the daily hassles like these.
If you are interested in learning more or participating in this study, you can contact Professor Park directly at yapark15@illinois.edu.
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