Incivility in Nursing: Creating Healthful Work Environments
This paper examines the issue of incivility in nursing workplaces, tracing its definition, manifestations, and consequences for nursing practice and patient care. Drawing on the American Nurses Association's position statement and peer-reviewed literature, the paper illustrates how incivility—ranging from overt bullying to subtle exclusion—undermines organizational culture and nurse well-being. A narrative scenario demonstrates the emotional and operational harm incivility causes. The paper then outlines three evidence-based strategies for creating healthful environments: nurse education and training, cultivation of a positive organizational culture, and implementation of a nursing peer review process. Practice application is discussed through the lens of an advanced practice nurse in an educational specialty track.
- Introduction: Incivility defined and paper scope outlined
- Understanding the Issue of Incivility: Definitions, forms, and complexity of incivility
- Importance of Incivility to Nursing: Why incivility threatens nursing culture and care
- A Story of Workplace Incivility: Narrative scenario illustrating incivility's harm
- Creating a Healthful Environment: Three strategies: training, culture, peer review
- Practice Application and Conclusion: APRN education role applied to civility solutions
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- Uses a concrete narrative scenario to make an abstract concept tangible, showing rather than only telling how incivility unfolds and spreads through a unit.
- Grounds each claim in cited, peer-reviewed sources, maintaining academic credibility throughout a relatively brief paper.
- Connects the issue directly to the student's specialty track, demonstrating applied professional thinking rather than purely theoretical analysis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper effectively uses a brief fictional vignette as an analytical anchor. Rather than leaving the scenario as a standalone illustration, the author immediately follows it with an interpretive paragraph that maps the narrative events onto concepts from the literature (burnout, communication failure, hostile work environment). This technique — narrate, then analyze — helps the reader see how theory applies to practice without requiring the author to invent complex empirical examples.
Structure breakdown
The paper follows a clear five-part structure: (1) definition and scope of incivility, (2) significance to nursing specifically, (3) a storytelling illustration with analytical commentary, (4) three evidence-based interventions for creating healthful environments, and (5) a practice-application section tied to the author's APRN education specialty. The conclusion synthesizes all sections and loops back to the opening claim about patient care quality.
Introduction
Incivility is a problem in many nursing workplaces around the world, and it is a problem because people sometimes forget what they are there to do. The nurse is there to serve the patient and to support other nurses in their duties to the patient. However, nurses can become unhappy, dissatisfied, angry, and unfriendly. They can bully one another, neglect one another, and cause emotional harm in the workplace. Incivility can lead to declines in nursing quality care (Lachman, 2015). This paper defines the issue of incivility, describes its importance to nursing, provides an illustrative narrative, explains how a healthful environment can be created, and discusses the practice application of this issue in nursing.
Understanding the Issue of Incivility
What is incivility? The American Nurses Association (2015) has defined it as a complex manifestation of disregard and insensitivity for others. Stanton (2015) explained incivility in a workplace setting as "individuals openly or secretly directing their dissatisfaction with their work settings at co-workers of equal or lower levels within an organization" (p. 7). While dissatisfaction towards a place or people may not seem like a significant issue, the manner in which it is manifested can have a severely negative effect on workplace culture and on the feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and morale of others (Manojlovich & Ketefian, 2016).
Moreover, the issue is complicated by the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all definition or expression of incivility: "Some harmful actions may be more overt, such as making demeaning comments or using intimidation to undermine a coworker. Other forms of incivility and bullying can be more covert, such as failing to intervene or withholding vital information when actions are clearly indicated and needed for work to be done in a safe manner" (American Nurses Association, 2015, p. 2). Identifying incivility and addressing it effectively in the workplace is both important and difficult to do, but it is something that must be addressed in order to prevent nurses from becoming detached from their work and indifferent to their duties, colleagues, and patients.
Importance of Incivility to Nursing
The issue of incivility is important to nursing because it represents a critical attack on the very essence of nursing itself: nursing is about nurturing and providing quality care to others. Nurses must interact positively not just with patients but also with each other, because they rely upon one another for moral support, guidance, and continuity of care. If nurses dismiss one another or act abusively or derisively towards one another, they disrupt the very fabric of solidarity they are meant to represent, and that in turn disrupts the quality of care they provide to patients (Lachman, 2015).
As Manojlovich and Ketefian (2016) show, organizational culture is very important to a nurse's ability to perform at a high level and provide quality care to patients. The culture must be supportive, positive, and encouraging—and incivility undermines that culture, fostering an environment that is negative, hurtful, and destructive. As Stanton (2015) points out, incivility is something nurses often do not even realize they are doing. Therefore, it is important to individual nurses, to the microsystem work environment, and to the nursing profession as a whole to identify the issue and address it.
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.