Patients incivility is an increasingly serious and pervasive problem in healthcare industry. Investigating its potential negative effect on the victimized healthcare workers and identifying possible solutions to mitigate these negative consequences is both theoretically and practically important. Drawing upon ego depletion theory, this study proposes that daily exposure to patients incivility would trigger employees’ surface acting behavior and then subject them to a state of ego depletion, which consequently leads to employees’ displaced aggression in the form of aggressive behavior towards coworkers and uncivil behavior towards family members on the same day. Furthermore, we posit that servant leadership can mitigate these sequential negative consequences. Based on a multi-source and multi-wave daily research design using Experience Sampling Method (ESM), We tested our hypotheses using multilevel path analysis approach with Bayesian estimation and found support for all the proposed hypotheses. Our research contributes to research on incivility spillover and provides practical implications for organizations to mitigate this negative spillover. Our research also has limitations, which suggest possible directions for future research.
