Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1007/s41542-026-00255-4

Publication Title

Occupational Health Science

Volume

10

Pages

12

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of incivility at work and the essential nature of sleep, study of this relationship is comparatively sparse in the organizational sciences literature. Further, although impaired sleep could logically impact how one interprets subsequent interpersonal interactions at work, the dominant approach is to study sleep as an outcome of perceived incivility. Therefore, we drew upon affective events theory, the affect-as-information hypothesis, and sleep physiology to argue that state affect, both positive and negative, can explain the relationship between perceived incivility and sleep quality in either direction. The hypotheses were tested using a between-subjects design with one-month time lags and employees recruited from Prolific (Study 1) and a within-subjects design with daily assessments and employees recruited from Mturk (Study2). Across both studies, the findings indicated consistent direct effects, wherein perceived incivility was related to poorer affect (i.e., higher NA, lower PA), while sleep quality was related to improved affect (i.e., lower NA, higher PA). Regarding indirect effects, PA mediated the incivility → sleep relationship in Study 1, whereas NA mediated the incivility → sleep relationship in Study 2. We expand upon the implications of these findings and directions for future research.

Rights

© The Authors 2026

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "The data is available upon request from the first author."

Original Publication Citation

McCord, M. A., Sawhney, G., Savage, N. M., & Fisher, K. M. (2026). Rude awakening: An examination of the incivility-sleep relationship via affect. Occupational Health Science, 10, Article 12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41542-026-00255-4

ORCID

0000-0002-5839-8520 (McCord), 0000-0002-3360-7445 (Sawhney), 0000-0003-2567-7053 (Savage),

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