Reactions of employees of color to workplace incivility—a low-intensity deviant behavior characterized by ambiguous intent to harm—are critical to understanding the experiences of a diverse workforce. The extent to which employees of color evaluate such ambiguous behavior as unjust warrants further investigation. I propose two explanatory pathways, cognitive and affective, through which incivility may foster perceptions of injustice. Within the cognitive pathway, I examined whether attributing racial discriminatory intent to incivility operates as an explanatory mechanism underlying injustice perceptions. Within the affective pathway, I investigated whether state negative affect contributes to the formation of injustice perceptions following experiences of incivility. In addition, I assessed whether job embeddedness, defined as the extent to which individuals feel stuck in their jobs, influences these pathways. Finally, I evaluated whether perceptions of injustice are associated with reduced job satisfaction. These hypotheses were tested in a sample of 93 full-time employees of color recruited through Prolific who completed six surveys over 10 workdays in a diary study. Using both path analysis modeling in R and PROCESS models in SPSS, results indicated that incivility could heighten perceptions of injustice when interpreted as racially discriminatory, thereby advancing understanding of the mechanisms through which incivility affects employees at work. Additional findings and their implications are discussed.
Joel Hernandez (Wed,) studied this question.