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Rude coworkers can have a toxic effect on your family life: study

A recent study says separating your work life from your home life may be harder than you think, and the toxic effects of rude or disrespectful colleagues can spread to your home.

(Google)

A recent study says separating your work life from your home life may be harder than you think, and the toxic effects of rude or disrespectful colleagues can spread to your home.

The research, led by professor Sandy Lim from the University of Singapore, found that when people get in a bad mood at work because of the “incivility,” or rude and discourteous behaviours of a colleague, those feelings don’t subside when they get home.

Instead, unhappy employees bring those bad moods home with them and lash out at family members.

To come up with their findings, the researchers surveyed 50 full-time employees over 10 working days, in the morning and afternoon, about how much hostility they felt at that moment and whether they had experienced any incivility that day (for example, whether a boss or colleague had put them down or had been condescending with them).

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Then, in the evening, the worker’s spouse recorded whether their partner had exhibited any anger or been withdrawn.

“Our findings show that the experience of incivility was positively related to feelings of hostility, which was in turn associated with increased angry family behaviours, as rated by the spouses,” wrote the researchers, indicating that spouses also found their partners to be withdrawn.

And Lim is not alone in her findings, a 2009 paper found that daily stresses at work cause people to express anger, irritability or to withdraw at home.

But the negative effects of associated with having a toxic working environment may not end there.

Research that tracked 820 adults over 20 years by scientists at Tel Aviv University found that middle-aged workers with little or no peer social support were 2.4 times more likely to die over the course of the study.

The effects of mean employees can also be measured in dollars. Workplace bullying costs between US$6 billion and $13 billion a year because of factors such as decreased productivity, increased absenteeism, staff turnover and poor morale.