The impact of civility interventions on employee social behavior, distress, and attitudes

Although incivility has been identified as an important issue in workplaces, little research has focused on reducing incivility and improving employee outcomes. Health care workers (N = 1,173, Time 1; N = 907, Time 2) working in 41 units completed a survey of social relationships, burnout, turnover intention, attitudes, and management trust before and after a 6-month intervention, CREW (Civility, Respect, and Engagement at Work). Most measures significantly improved for the 8 intervention units, and these improvements were significantly greater than changes in the 33 contrast units. Specifically, significant interactions indicating greater improvements in the intervention groups than in the contrast groups were found for coworker civility, supervisor incivility, respect, cynicism, job satisfaction, management trust, and absences. Improvements in civility mediated improvements in attitudes. The results suggest that this employee-based civility intervention can improve collegiality and enhance health care provider outcomes.     

Confucianism, Democracy, and the Virtue of Deference

Some democratic theorists have argued that contemporary people should practice only a civility that recognizes others as equal persons, and eschew any form of deference to authority as a feudalistic cultural holdover that ought to be abandoned in the modern era. Against such views, this essay engages early Confucian views of ethics and society, including their analyses of different sorts of authority and status, in order to argue that, properly understood, deference is indeed a virtue of considerable importance for contemporary democratic societies and the citizens who constitute them.     

White Practitioners in Therapeutic Ally-Ance: An Intersectional Privilege Awareness Training Model

Among White¹When referring to individuals or a group of people, “White” is capitalized in accordance with APA style guidelines. However, references to concepts such as whiteness and white privilege, guilt, and identity are not capitalized. licensed psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and counselors, research has documented a severe lack of awareness of unconscious stereotyping, systemic racism, white privilege, and white racial identity. This article introduces a privilege awareness pedagogical model as a framework for White students in clinical training programs learning about white privilege, enhancing multicultural competencies, and developing as effective allies in the therapeutic relationship, or therapeutic ally-ance. The model emphasizes intersectional privilege studies to address white privilege along with a wide variety of oppressions often neglected in the curriculum, involves personal reflection on biases and assumptions to enhance multicultural competencies, and promotes student learning through social action to dismantle privilege. The pedagogical benefits of the following activities and assignments are described: 1) group analysis of therapeutic scenarios, 2) photo-voice identity assignment, 3) white privilege reflection paper, and 4) identities education project.     

Virtue, personality, and social relations: self-control as the moral muscle

Morality is a set of rules that enable people to live together in harmony, and virtue involves internalizing those rules. Insofar as virtue depends on overcoming selfish or antisocial impulses for the sake of what is best for the group or collective, self-control can be said to be the master virtue. We analyze vice, sin, and virtue from the perspective of self-control theory. Recent research findings indicate that self-control involves expenditure of some limited resource and suggest the analogy of a moral muscle as an appropriate way to conceptualize virtue in personality. Guilt fosters virtuous self-control by elevating inter-personal obligations over personal, selfish interests. Several features of modern Western society make virtue and self-control especially difficult to achieve.     

Assessing Workgroup Norms for Civility: The Development of the Civility Norms Questionnaire-Brief

Purpose

This research describes the development and validation of the Civility Norms Questionnaire-Brief (CNQ-B), a 4-item measure designed to assess workgroup climate for civility. Climate for civility is defined as employee perceptions of norms supporting respectful treatment among workgroup members.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Five samples (N?=?2,711) of adult employees, including two from distinct organizations and three from multiple organizations, responded to the CNQ-B and additional measures.

Findings

Evidence for the internal consistency, and convergent and discriminant validity of the CNQ-B was observed. Additionally, evidence for the criterion-related and incremental validity of the CNQ-B was demonstrated as it was a significant predictor of later-assessed incivility experiences and accounted for significant variability in work attitudes beyond incivility experiences and related measures.

Implications

The CNQ-B is a psychometrically sound instrument despite being composed of only four items. The CNQ-B can be used by researchers and practitioners alike to assess climate for civility, to study climate for civility as a precursor to incivility experiences, and to target workgroups that could benefit from interventions (e.g., training) to enhance civility and reduce incivility.

Originality/Value

This is one of the first studies to conduct a rigorous psychometric assessment of a measure of workgroup climate for civility that is grounded in theory and research on workplace civility and incivility. At four items, the CNQ-B is the shortest assessment tool currently available that is designed for this purpose.     

White Privilege,Psychoanalytic Ethics,and the Limitations of Political Silence

Abstract

The moral and philosophical interrogation of white privilege remains an imperative in post-apartheid South Africa. Whereas the critique of whiteness involves both philosophical and psychological scrutiny, subsequent calls for white political silence and withdrawal have yet to be subjected to adequate psychological analysis. This paper offers such an analysis by questioning, firstly, the idea of appropriate emotions for white South Africans (shame, guilt, regret), posing instead the problems of mimed affect and neurotic goodness. White approaches to guilt-alleviation and political passivity are queried, secondly, via the claim that such agendas lead all too easily to types of white exceptionalism and condescension, respectively. The ethical problems of political silence and withdrawal – implied superiority, non-participation and an unequal ‘rights of silence’ – provide a third area of questioning. The paper ends by introducing the Lacanian ideas of subjective destitution and identification with the symptom. These concepts throw a critical light on disavowals of white privilege and provide a novel means of thinking how white narcissism might be relinquished.     

Which Teacher Should I Choose?: A Xunzian Approach to Distinguishing Moral Experts from Fanatics

This essay examines whether an invocation of an epistemological privilege on the part of supposed moral experts prevents potential students from being able to evaluate among potential candidates for the role of plausible moral teacher. Throughout, it works to demonstrate that it is possible for even the untutored student to distinguish between a fanatic and a moral expert. In particular, this essay focuses on the version of virtue ethics espoused by the early Chinese philosopher Xunzi. It argues that by reflecting on the attributes of fanatics, as well as on Xunzi's ideas and arguments about students and teachers, it is possible to arrive at a general set of principles that provide beginners with the tools necessary to distinguish dangerous fanatics from plausible moral teachers, even given the fact that both claim for themselves an epistemological privilege.     

追寻美德的统一——古希腊德性统一性问题

德性是古希腊一个重要的道德观念,对德性统一性的追求也是古希腊道德实践与思想领域的一个显著特征。从荷马史诗、苏格拉底、柏拉图到亚里士多德,表现了对德性统一性追求的不同路径。而德性统一性问题与古希腊对德性本身的理解有着必然联系,但从更深层意义上说,是由古希腊现实社会状况所决定的。     

Virtue ethics and modern society—A response to the thesis of the modern predicament of virtue ethics

The revival of modern Western virtue ethics presents the question of whether or not virtue ethics is appropriate for modern society. Ethicists believe that virtue ethics came from traditional society, to which it conforms so well. The appearance of the market economy and a utilitarian spirit, together with society’s diversification, is a sign that modern society has arrived. This also indicates a transformation in the moral spirit. But modern society has not made virtues less important, and even as modern life has become more diversified, rule-following ethics have taken on even greater importance. Modern ethical life is still the ethical life of individuals whose self-identity contains the identity of moral spirit, and virtues have a very important influence on the self-identical moral characters. Furthermore, modern society, which is centered around utilitarianism, makes it apparent that rules themselves are far from being adequate and virtues are important. Virtues are a moral resource for modern people to resist modern evils.     

Antiracist Moral Identities,or Iris Murdoch in South Africa

Abstract

I argue that Samantha Vice understates the moral resources white people have available to them to minimize their falling into distorted ways of perceiving and responding to the world caused by bare white advantage. In doing so, she paints an unjustifiably pessimistic picture of white civic involvement in South Africa, and anywhere where white people are unjustly advantaged, such as the United States. I delineate two similar but distinct antiracist moral identities—the ‘white ally’ and the ‘person committed to racial justice’—that can guide civic engagement, as well as provide a counterweight to the distortions of whiteness. I argue that Vice’s recommendation of withdrawal from public engagement in humble silence is not the most morally appropriate response to white privilege.     

Civility as Political Constraint

Res Publica - The everyday virtue of civility functions as a constraint upon informal social pressures. Can civility also be understood, as John Rawls has proposed, as a distinctively political...     

Extending the Knapsack: Using the White Privilege Analysis to Examine Conferred Advantage and Disadvantage

This article describes a self-awareness activity that utilizes a directed reading on privilege and a small-group discussion format to examine unearned disadvantage and unearned advantage in one’s life. This exercise can help clinicians to better understand systemic and individual sources of power and privilege in society. Beginning with my previous work on white privilege, students can extend this analysis to other domains of privilege, including, for example, gender, class, sexuality, age, nationality, and physical ability, to name a few. The primary goals of this reflective exercise are to help clinicians understand how clients’ lives are influenced by societal disadvantages and advantages, to encourage a new understanding of oneself, and to increase empathy towards clients.     

Vice’s Vicious Virtues: The Supererogatory as Obligatory

Abstract

Samantha Vice’s essay, ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, is a sensitive and subtle exploration of the difficult moral terrain of the issues of white responsibility and white moral self-reform in a South Africa that is formally post-apartheid, but still profoundly shaped by the legacy of white domination, both in its enduring socio-economic structures and in its citizens’ typical moral psychologies. Vice’s conclusion is that shame is the moral emotion most appropriate for whites unable to free themselves from white privilege and live up to what she sees as the required standards of moral excellence. In response, I argue that she is in effect making the supererogatory obligatory, and constructing an unrealistic schedule of virtues. Drawing on various recent writings on non-ideal theory, I suggest that standard moral distinctions need to be relocated to take systemic social oppression into account, thereby yielding a more forgiving moral taxonomy than Vice’s own over-demanding mapping.     

Paradox explored: Climate shame,moral agency,the church,and the birds

This article explores shame and moral agency in relationship to the climate catastrophe, and the moral situation of the world's relatively high-consuming people who are implicated in greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. The author complexifies that situation in the conundrums of climate colonialism, climate racism, structural sin, and the moral ambiguities they raise, including such questions as: “What are the moral demands of climate sin grounded in historically rooted economic systems that one did not create but upon which the material conditions of one's life depend? To what extent, if any, is the individual morally accountable for the social structures of which one is a part and from which one benefits?” From there, the essay moves to its central question. It is whether shame theory might help to enable moral agency for what is desperately needed now by people of climate privilege and economic privilege in the North Atlantic world—wise and courageous action to address climate change and climate injustice. The article probes shame theory for clues to what disables moral agency and what catalyzes it. The author finds in shame theory pathways for transforming shame-based moral inertia into moral agency. Those pathways suggest vital roles for the church.     

Are Faculty Strikes Unethical?

It has been argued that strikes are morally objectionable in the university context. They injure third parties – the students – and for this reason ought to be rejected. More generally, the strike weapon has led to a reduction of the power of Boards of Governors to adjust universities to changing times. And furthermore, the use of the strike weapon and the ensuing conflicts can injure the collegial form of governance that is essential to higher education. It is here argued that these arguments are hardly conclusive, and that there are virtues to having the strike as a means to resolve disputes. But keeping things on track requires both parties to adhere to the moral and social virtue of civility.     

佛教果报理论与《聊斋志异》伦理思想

佛教果报理论与伦理观念的总原则是 :诸恶莫作 ,众善奉行 ;恶有恶报 ,善有善报 ,不是不报 ,时候未到。而《聊斋志异》叙述得最多的就是善恶之业 ,果报不爽 ,在劫难逃的故事。概言之 ,作者不仅借助佛教善恶报应的因果理论来宣说一定的纲常伦理观念 ,而且也借助佛教的因果规律来展开情节 ,塑造人物 ,交代故事的来龙去脉 ,使之更合乎情理。从而使人们通过阅读这些故事 ,更加明确遵守纲常伦理的重要性 ,增强社会道德的责任感 ,自觉修善积德 ,防恶止非 ,在严格要求自己的同时 ,也建立起良好的社会关系。     

Developing the Good Physician: Spirituality affects the development of virtues and moral intuitions in medical students

The Project on the Good Physician is a national longitudinal study of moral and professional formation of American physicians over the course of medical training. The purpose of this paper is to examine the processes by which spirituality influences the development of three virtues (mindfulness, empathic compassion, and generosity) in medical students as mediated by the moral intuition to care/harm, as well as make predictions as to how this type of study could be generalizable to other populations. Study participants were 563 medical students recruited by the University of Chicago from 24 medical schools across the U.S. (54.7% male, 57% white) who completed measures assessing virtue formation 9 months apart. Path analysis of a cascade model showed that spirituality (but not religiousness) was directly and indirectly related to change in the virtue empathic compassion, and also indirectly related to change in the virtue generosity. Moreover, the moral intuition to care/harm partially mediated the association between spirituality and the virtues of empathic compassion and generosity (but not mindfulness).     

道德概念的隐喻表征——从红白颜色、左右位置和正斜字体的维度

随着具身认知的兴起和发展,道德隐喻的研究焕发新活力。在此背景下,本研究从红白颜色、左右位置和正斜字体三个维度考察道德概念的隐喻表征。实验1的结果显示,红白颜色可能并不与道德概念存在隐喻表征。实验2表明,左右位置与道德概念交互作用显著,左边、右边位置分别与不道德概念、道德概念存在一致的隐喻表征。实验3发现,正斜字体对道德概念的判断具有干扰作用,正体字与道德词汇隐喻表征一致,斜体字与不道德词汇隐喻表征一致。研究表明:左右位置、正斜字体与道德概念存在一定的隐喻联结。     

道德概念的黑白隐喻表征及其对道德认知的影响

采用不同的研究方法在不同水平上考察道德概念的黑白隐喻表征, 探讨了黑白视知觉对道德认知的影响。实验1a发现, 在词汇选择任务中被试倾向于判断白色希腊文词汇具有道德意义, 判断黑色希腊文词汇具有不道德意义。实验1b通过词性判断任务表明, 当道德词以白色呈现、不道德词以黑色呈现时被试的判断反应更快。实验2显示, 当将道德两难故事呈现在黑色背景上时, 相比于呈现在白色背景上, 被试会在道德评判任务中将故事中人物的行为判断为更加不道德。实验3通过情境实验发现, 相比明亮环境, 在黑暗环境中完成实验的被试会更倾向于认为他人会不公正地对待自己。研究证明, 黑白颜色概念与道德概念的隐喻联结存在心理现实性, 黑白颜色刺激知觉会对道德判断产生影响作用, 且环境的亮度也会影响到人们对道德相关问题的认知判断。     

CONSENT,CONVERSION, AND MORAL FORMATION: Stoic Elements in Jonathan Edwards's Ethics

The contemporary revival of virtue ethics has focused primarily on retrieving central moral commitments of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the Neoplatonist traditions. Christian virtue ethicists would do well to expand this retrieval further to include the writings of the Roman Stoics. This essay argues that the ethics of Jonathan Edwards exemplifies major Stoic themes and explores three noteworthy points of intersection between Stoic ethics and Edwards's thought: a conception of virtue as consent to a benevolent providence, the identification of virtue as a singular and transformative good, and an account of moral formation as simultaneously self‐directed and received. Common ground between Edwards and the Stoics illustrates the value of recognizing Stoic moral thought as a philosophical framework that can enhance and undergird Christian ethicists' understandings of moral development and the nature of virtue.