The Importance of Teaching Civility as a Workplace Relationship Building Competency

This paper explores the importance of teaching civility as a workplace relationship building competency.  First, civility is defined and described as it pertains to workplace culture.  Then organizational examples are provided to demonstrate why companies care about civility.  Next, we ponder civility as a relationship building competency that is important for work-related relationships.  Continuing our investigation, we list some of the indirect costs of incivility and bullying (both are antitheses of civility) to stakeholders in the workplace.  We consider through organizational examples what a civil workplace is like and we survey ways of teaching civility in the Business school (B-School) classroom, either face to face or online as these are the platforms through which we teach, learn, and work.