Trickle-down incivility in healthcare: a self-control perspective on supervisor-to-nurse incivility

Purpose – Nursing incivility remains a pervasive issue in healthcare settings, impacting nursing individuals and organizational dynamics. Drawing on ego-depletion theory, we investigate the trickle-down effects of nursing supervisor incivility on nursing employee incivility toward coworkers. It further examines state self-control resource depletion as a mediating mechanism and trait self-control as a boundary condition moderating this indirect relationship. Design/methodology/approach – A three-wave, time-lagged and single-source data was administered to nursing staff across seven major public and private sector hospitals to empirically test the proposed moderated mediation model. Findings – Mediation analyses reveal that supervisor incivility depletes nursing employees' state self-control resources, which in turn leads to coworker-directed incivility. Moderated mediation results further demonstrate that this indirect effect is attenuated for employees with high trait self-control, suggesting that trait self-control buffers against the depletion process and reduces the trickle-down effect. Originality/value – We advance the nursing incivility literature by identifying a self-regulatory mechanism through which incivility cascades within healthcare teams and by emphasizing the protective role of individual differences in trait self-control. These findings offer both theoretical insights and practical implications for managing interpersonal mistreatment in hierarchical healthcare settings.