Graduation Year

2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Granting Department

Psychology

Major Professor

Paul E. Spector, Ph.D

Committee Member

Walter C. Borman, Ph.D

Committee Member

Thomas E. Bernard, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Michael D. Coovert, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Joseph Vandello, Ph.D.

Keywords

work place climate, Employee Well-Being, Rudeness, Workplace Safety

Abstract

This study used Zohar‟s (2000) multi-level model of climate to examine the extent to which shared perceptions of workplace civility climate relate to teacher job satisfaction, affective commitment, and counterproductive work behaviors (CWB-abuse) towards other teachers. Workplace civility climate is defined as employee perceptions of how management uses policies, procedures, and practices to maintain a civil workplace. An online-survey was used to assess a cross-sectional sample of K-12 teachers (N = 2222) nested in 207 schools in a large US school district. There was adequate agreement among teacher perceptions of school civility climate for aggregation and between-group variance of civility climate among schools. The results of hierarchical linear models revealed school-level civility climate perceptions were significantly negatively associated with lower levels of teacher experienced incivility, CWB-abuse and associated with higher levels job satisfaction and affective commitment, thus supporting four out of five hypotheses. However, school-level civility climate did not function as a moderator of the relationship between a teacher‟s experience of incivility and acts of CWB-abuse towards other teachers. The findings of this study provide evidence that shared perceptions of civility climate are associated with higher levels of individual-level employee well-being.

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