The Relationship between Workplace Incivility and Helping Behavior: Roles of Job Dissatisfaction and Political Skill

This article investigates the mediating role of job dissatisfaction in the relationship between employees' perceptions of workplace incivility and their helping behavior, as well as the buffering role of political skill in this process. Three-wave, time-lagged data collected from employees and their supervisors revealed that employees' exposure to workplace incivility diminished their helping behavior through their sense of job dissatisfaction. This mediating role of job dissatisfaction was less salient, however, to the extent that employees were equipped with political skill. For organizations, this study accordingly pinpoints a key mechanism—namely, unhappiness about their job situation—through which rude coworker treatment links to lower voluntary workplace behaviors among employees, and it reveals how this mechanism can be better contained in the presence of political skill.