Faculty-to-faculty incivility in nursing academia: A qualitative systematic review

In the nursing context, incivility and bullying have been studied for decades. Although nursing is both a caring and compassionate field, incivility is often witnessed in the professional workplace setting (De Villers & Cohn, 2017). Many studies have investigated the phenomenon of incivility in nursing academia, mainly between nursing students and their educators (Park and Kang, 2020, Park and Kang, 2021). However, relatively limited evidence exists on incivility between faculty members (McGee, 2021), likely because academia is expected to remain a place in which highly educated professors can interact through a culture of collegiality, academic freedom, and autonomy. In contrast to this notion, a multi-country study among nurse educators in Chile, Italy, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Turkey found prevalent faculty-to-faculty incivility (hereafter “faculty incivility”), ranging from moderate to severe (Al-Jubouri et al., 2021). This finding was also supported in a national survey of the Unites States (Clark et al., 2021). In other words, faculty incivility is a global issue in nursing education.

Multiple terms are interchangeably used with incivility, including “horizontal violence,” “mobbing,” and “bullying.” To cover this range, Clark (2017, p.15) adopted the concept of a continuum of incivility ranging “from distracting, annoying and irritating behaviors to aggressive and potentially violent behaviors.” This study also used “incivility” as an umbrella term to describe various levels of disruptive behaviors across the continuum.

Nurse educators compete for grants, funds, scholarly publications, and various aspects of student education. This often creates jealousy, pressure to obtain monetary resources, and job stress due to excessive workloads, all of which contribute to faculty incivility (Clark et al., 2013). In this context, faculty victims have reported far-reaching negative outcomes, including physical damage, psychological distress, and decreased job satisfaction (Taylor et al., 2019). Here, the failure of a timely intervention for faculty incivility decreases the motivation for nurse educators to engage in quality education and research. Consequently, competent nurse educators are driven out, which worsens existing faculty shortages in countries such as the United States (DeMarco et al., 2018). In the absence of proper management, victims will become accustomed to incivility and may even adopt uncivil behaviors toward peers and students, thus generating a long-term cycle of violence among nurse educators, students, and practitioners.

As uncivil behaviors can take subtle and overt forms (DeMarco et al., 2018), faculty incivility is a complex phenomenon. The perception of incivility varies at the individual level, wherein one person may consider a particular behavior to be uncivil while another may not (McGee, 2021). Considering these nuances, it is difficult to gain an in-depth understanding of faculty incivility, which highlights the value of qualitative explorations. While a basic literature search shows that multiple qualitative studies have focused on faculty incivility, systematic reviews of the subject are lacking. In this regard, a synthesis of qualitative findings is accomplished through a meta-aggregation approach that can provide the best evidence to formulate policies and interventions in nursing education, which involves different stakeholders (Lockwood et al., 2015). The authors conducted a systematic review of qualitative studies to gain a comprehensive understanding of how nursing faculty members experience incivility from their colleagues in academia.

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