Professional Civility—Communicative Virtue at Work

Winner of the Everett Lee Hunt Award 2014.
Winner of the NCA Clifford G. Christians Ethics Research Award 2013 from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research

The crisis of incivility plaguing today’s workplace calls for an approach to communication that restores respect and integrity to interpersonal encounters in organizational life. Professional civility is a communicative virtue that protects and promotes productivity, one’s place of employment, and persons with whom we carry out our tasks in the workplace. Drawn from the history of professions as dignified occupations providing valuable contributions to the human community, an understanding of civility as communicative virtue, and MacIntyre’s treatment of practices, professional civility supports the «practice» of professions in contemporary organizations. A communicative ethic of professional civility requires attentiveness to the task at hand, support of an organization’s mission, and appropriate relationships with others in the workplace. Professional civility fosters communicative habits of the heart that extend beyond the walls of the workplace, encouraging a return to the service ethic that remains an enduring legacy of the professions in the United States.

Janie M. Harden Fritz received her PhD in communication arts from the University of Wisconsin. She is professor in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University. She is co-editor (with Becky L. Omdahl) of Problematic Relationships in the Workplace Volumes 1 and 2 (Peter Lang, 2006, 2012), co-editor (with S. Alyssa Groom) of Communication Ethics and Crisis (2012), and co-author (with Ronald C. Arnett and Leeanne M. Bell) of Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue and Difference (2009). She is a past president of the Eastern Communication Association and the Religious Communication Association.