Rudeness Hits The Bottom Line
USC Marshall School of Business professor Christine Porath and co-author Christine Pearson, a professor of management at Thunderbird School of Global Management, discovered just how much bad manners can impact the bottom line while researching a new book, The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It.
Texting in meetings, spreading rumours, taking credit for others’ work, ignoring emails and not saying “please” and “thank you” are more than just annoyances.
In fact Porath and Pearson claim that the stress this causes could cost to $300 billion in lost productivity as those affected let their performance slip, lose interest in going the extra mile or just look for jobs elsewhere.
But the impact of rudeness, which they define as ranging from “taking credit to others’ efforts” to throwing a temper tantrum, isn’t just felt by those directly effected by it.
Even those who witnesses such incidents are likely to be affected by them.
Critically, if it is a customer who sees an instance of incivility among staff, there is a fifty percent chance that they will not patronize that business again.
Photo by brainloc.
Jaclyn Wells on August 11th, 2009 1:32 pm
I agree with this 100%, there is nothing worse than a rude person whether it be a customer service rep who is waiting on you or one of your fellow co-workers, either way…it’s more than annoying. It makes people walk away from deals all the time, walk away from purchases and makes employees not want to work along side someone who is a rude person which ultimately again could cost the company money.
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