Browsing by Author "Goldman, Chloe B., author"

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Open Access
Don't take that tone with me! An examination of attribution and evaluation as a consequence of incivility perceived in workplace email
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Goldman, Chloe B., author; Fisher, Gwenith, advisor; Cleveland, Jeanette, committee member; Henle, Chris, committee member; Long, Ziyu, committee member; Prince, Mark, committee member
This research investigated how people in the workforce interpret and react to the experience of incivility when it is perceived in workplace email. The purpose of this study was to assess relationships between perceptions of incivility in email, the fundamental attribution error, and associated judgments made about the email content and sender. Moreover, this work examined the similarity-attraction paradigm to test whether perceptions of similarity to the email sender moderated the aforementioned relationships. In this vignette-based survey, participants were asked to evaluate email content in the context of hypothetical workplace scenarios. These participants were recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce pool (MTurk), resulting in a final sample of 219 respondents. Results indicated that people make the fundamental attribution error more often when perceptions of incivility are high, and that perceiving incivility is associated with a poorer evaluation of the email sender's communication skills and with a lower desire to work with that email sender in the future. In addition, participants who perceived themselves to be more similar to the email sender evaluated the email sender positively even when they detected incivility. Findings in this study do not support that the perception of incivility or attribution was related to email content ambiguity or cognitive load. This work contributes empirical evidence to research about email and computer mediated communication (CMC) in organizations and the pitfalls of miscommunication or misinterpretation on lean media platforms. Implications for workplace training and organizational policy change are discussed.
Open Access
Rethinking rudeness: the nuanced impact of workplace e-mail incivility on cognitive performance
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Goldman, Chloe B., author; Fisher, Gwenith, advisor; French, Kimberly, committee member; Henle, Chris, committee member; Rhodes, Matthew, committee member
This research builds on prior work examining the relationship between perceived incivility in workplace e-mail and task performance. This study proposed attribution theory and self-determination theory as helping to explain the widely supported negative relationship between incivility and performance. The study design was between-subjects and implemented experimental vignette methodology (EVM) to determine if exposure to an uncivil e-mail impacted perceptions of blame attribution and thwarted fundamental needs as well as subsequent performance on a working memory task. Results based on a sample of 411 working adults recruited on Prolific reveal that, contrary to ample evidence indicating that incivility is detrimental to performance, the incivility-performance relationship appears to be more nuanced than the literature suggests. Findings introduce additional complexity to the experience of incivility: they provide evidence that the level of perceived rudeness might moderate how incivility relates to performance and that some responses, such as external attribution and thwarted relatedness, might even be advantageous to task performance. This work has important implications for how applied psychologists study incivility and understand it in terms of its influence on objective cognitive performance.