Instigated Incivility, Guilt Expression, and Performance: Moderating Role of Religiosity

Abstract

With a theoretical grounding in conservation of resources theory, this study examines how instigated incivility may boost instigators' job performance, in a process that might be explained by the instigators' expressions of guilt and moderated by their religious faith. The hypotheses tests rely on multisource, three-wave data collected from employees and their supervisors in Pakistani organizations. The findings, generated with the Process macro, affirm that (1) an important reason that instigated incivility translates into enhanced in-role and extra-role job performance is the instigators' desire to express guilty feelings and (2) this mediating role is especially prominent among employees who hold strong religious beliefs. For management scholars, this study's focus on incivility perpetrators provides an important complement to traditional considerations of incivility victims. For practitioners, it reveals how employees' own uncivil behaviors, somewhat counterintuitively, lead to enhanced performance outcomes and how religious faith serves as a catalyst of this process.