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www.IndependentRetailer.com MANAGEMENT Working Well With Others
RETAIL MANAGERS now have two compelling reasons to encourage employees to be polite in the workplace; polite to each other, that is. Sure, re- tailers know that rudeness to a customer means lost goodwill and lost sales, but new research reveals that rudeness shown by one employee towards another one is damaging too. Moreover, a different study shows that rudeness can interfere with ef- fi cient cognition. A University of Southern California team, led by professor Deborah Ma- cInnis and assistant professor Christine Porath, found that cus- tomers who witness employees being rude to other employees tend to make negative general- izations regarding the store’s staff, the store in general, and future visits to the store. Even if the employee is not rude to the customer, just being rude to a fellow worker can make custom- ers angry or upset. The research results, pub- “Journal of
lished in the,
Consumer Research,” found that a store manager calling an employee, “an idiot,” inspired customers to jump to negative conclusions about the company. Even when the rudeness was in support of the customer, the effect was negative. In part of the research, a retail clerk gossiped on the phone for several minutes, ignoring the customer. When the clerk was
Christine Porath Assistant Professor at University of Southern California
reprimanded rudely by another employee in front of the cus- tomer, the customer was still turned off, even though the rude behavior was intended to help the customer. Porath, the author of, The
Cost of Bad Behavior, tells Cover Magazine that rudeness damages retailers. “When you just witness incivility as a cus- tomer, people get very angry and generalize quite negatively. People will not support busi- nesses where this happens. It does hit the bottom line,” she says. Her research revealed that this negative response comes from basic human consider- ation. “Morally and ethically, we just don’t like to see people treated that way.” The negative
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consequences of rude words or behavior are not limited to turn- ing off customers. Rudeness also decreases the ability to think creatively and solve prob- lems. A study by psychologist, Amir Erez, at the University of Florida found that anyone witnessing rudeness not only had decreased success solving problems, but rudeness tends to set free their inner demons. Associate professor Erez gave subjects a few simple mental challenges: to unscramble sev- eral words and to think of new ways to use a brick. Some of the test subjects were fi rst exposed to a study leader berating an underling by saying, “What are you, stupid? Get on with it!” And he said that the underling was unfi t to hold a job in the, “real world.” Study participants who wit-
nessed the verbal abuse had less success doing the mental tasks. Even worse, they tend- ed to unscramble “demure” as “murder,” and the uses they suggested for the brick included attacking people, killing people, and throwing it through a win- dow. Overall they came up with fewer ideas for using the brick than did the control group. The results of this study were published in a journal, “Organi- zational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.” Erez went on to study rude-
continued on page 97 September 2010 95
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