Perpetrated incivility: Individual vs contextual antecedents — a reflective viewpoint

This conceptual paper revisits the antecedents of perpetrated workplace incivility from a reflective viewpoint, asking how much of incivility is explained by stable individual characteristics of perpetrators versus features of the organizational context in which they operate. Research on incivility has grown rapidly, yet the literature remains unevenly divided between dispositional accounts, which emphasize traits such as agreeableness, narcissism, or negative affectivity, and situational accounts, which stress workplace stressors, norms, and climate. We critically review evidence on both streams and argue that each, taken alone, is insufficient to explain why some employees repeatedly engage in uncivil behavior while others do not. Building on models of person–situation interaction, we propose a framework in which contextual factors—such as perceived injustice, leadership style, and workload pressure—interact with individual dispositions to shape the probability of uncivil conduct. We also discuss how organizational conditions can either amplify or buffer dispositional tendencies, and how repeated uncivil acts gradually shift from isolated incidents to normalized patterns. Implications are drawn for incivility research, pointing to the need for multilevel designs and longitudinal data, and for practice, highlighting leverage points for prevention that target both selection and organizational design.