The relationship between job demands and workplace incivility in an industrial company: the mediating role of emotional exhaustion and moderating role of perceived organizational support

Introduction: workplace incivility is one of the subtle forms of interpersonal and organizational abuse. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the causal relationship between job demands and workplace incivility with the mediating role of emotional exhaustion and the moderating role of perceived organizational support in an industrial company employee. Materials and Methods: In this descriptive correlational study, the statistical population was all employees of Bojnourd Cement Company, and 321 workers were selected according to the Cochran formula and by a simple random sampling method. The research data were collected using the Cortina et al. (2001) workplace incivility questionnaires, Jong et al. (1993) job demands, Maslachchr('39')s emotional exhaustion (1981), and Eisenberger et al. (1986) perceived organizational support. SPSS and AMOS 23 software were used for data analysis. Results: The results showed that the proposed model has a good fit. Job demands have a direct and indirect effect through emotional exhaustion on workplace incivility (p> 0.0001). The results also showed that the interaction of job demands and perceived organizational support, beyond the effects of the main variables, produced 1.5% added monopoly variance (R2Δ = 0.015, FΔ = 49.50, P <0.05) for the model. Conclusion: The results showed the importance of organizational support as a moderator and emotional exhaustion as a mediator between the relationship between job demands and workplace incivility. Therefore, organizations can reduce emotional exhaustion and workplace incivility by reducing their job demands. Supportive programs are also suggested to reduce the impact of job demands on workplace incivility.