Vad är ohövligt beteende på den svenska arbetsplatsen?

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis is to investigate how the phenomenon of workplace incivility is experienced amongst Swedish employees and to define the concept of workplace incivility within a Swedish context. The study was carried out using semi-structured interviews on six participants from southern Sweden. Five main themes were identified through thematic analysis; intention, power, impact, expectation and respect. The analysis concludes that a definition of workplace incivility should be focused on the victim’s subjective experience. The offender´s intention with workplace incivility can be both conscious and unconscious, which can cause the victim to experience the intent as ambiguous. This carries some resemblance to Anderson and Pearson’s (1999) definition. However, we do find that there are differences which could be due to variations in local work cultures as well as interpretation methods. The result shows a difference in the importance of incivility intensity and intention depending on the relationship between the offender and the victim. Finally we find that a definition adapted to a Swedish context increases the understanding of the phenomenon.