Rudeness in the workplace causes employees to make more
mistakes, experts revealed.
Workers who are treated unpleasantly, or witness colleagues
being treated badly, make more errors than usual, studies showed.
“Human attention is powerfully driven by emotion,” said
Professor Rhona Flin of the University of Aberdeen, in an editorial
published in the British Medical Journal.
In one study, students who were insulted by a professor on the
way to a test session performed worse on a series of memory tasks than
the ones who were not spoken to rudely.
“This reaction is probably caused by the emotional arousal
caused by the rudeness, which resulted in a switchover of cognitive
capacity to deal with the required emotional processing, or it may, more
simply, be caused by distraction,” said Flin.
In another test a student who was late for a group experiment
apologized, but was told by the person in charge: “What is it with you?
You arrive late... you are irresponsible... look at you ... how do you
expect to hold down a job in the real world?”
This was delivered at a normal volume and the level of
rudeness was not extreme, but students who witnessed the exchange then
performed significantly worse on memory and creativity tasks than
students in the control group who did not observe a rude interaction.
Flin believed the link between rudeness and mistakes was
particularly worrying in the health care profession, where it could risk
patients’ safety.
“Recent studies suggest that disagreements and aggression
between clinical staff are not uncommon,” she wrote.
In a survey of 391 staff of operating rooms in British public
hospitals, 66 percent of respondents said they had “received aggressive
behavior” from nurses and 53 percent from surgeons during the previous
six months.
“If incivility does occur in operating theaters and affects
workers’ ability to perform tasks, the risks for surgical patients —
whose treatment depends on particularly high levels of mental
concentration and flawless task execution — could increase.”
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