The price, they say, is paid not just by the individual worker but by the company or organization as well.

New research indicates that rudeness, in addition to being a distracting irritant to the worker, actually can affect the company's bottom line by reducing productivity and leading to costly worker turnover.

At pharmaceutical company Glaxo Wellcome Inc., in Research Triangle Park, N.C., for example, two recent incidents highlighted the incivility problem, said spokeswoman Ramona Jones.

In one, two workers were filing papers together in a small cubicle and bumped into each other, she said, which escalated into an exchange of insults and then punches. Corporate security guards had to break up the fight.

On another day, a company scientist who is also a medical doctor was stopped by a security guard as he carried a typewriter out of the building. When the scientist was told he needed to fill out paperwork before he could remove company-owned property from the building, he became irate over an inconvenience caused by a person he considered an underling. The scientist became so angry that he threw the typewriter at the security guard. Glaxo Wellcome fired him.

"Are people ruder at work? Yes, it's everyone's perception," said Ray Cvjetnicanin, Glaxo Wellcome's senior manager of corporate security. "It seems to be a growing problem. . . . And it's these little everyday occurences that can lead to aggression in the workplace."

Academics and industrial psychologists use a number of terms to describe the phenomenon: workplace incivility, counterproductive behavior, workplace aggression, personality conflict, workplace mistreatment, interpersonal deviance, bullying, mobbing.

"There are so many terms, I'm keeping a running list," said social psychologist Loraleigh Keashly, an associate professor of urban and labor studies at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Joel H. Neuman, director of the Center for Applied Management at the State University of New York at New Paltz, said research he has conducted during the past four years indicates that workplace aggression rises when budgets are reduced, when work forces become more diverse, when management changes, when computers are used to monitor worker productivity, when pay cuts are planned, and when companies hire more part-time workers and fewer full-time workers.

"We talk about a leaner, meaner workplace," Neuman said. "But that creates an atmosphere where this is more likely to happen. . . . If a person has no vested interest, and if you believe you won't be with these people too long, you don't care what they think."

The researchers say workplace hostilities mirror incidents of social incivility, such as road rage and deadly duels over parking spaces.

Problems can flare at work because of corporate downsizings that cause workers to battle one another to survive job cuts and because of the demands created by the new forms of instantaneous electronic communication. These pressures, researchers say, are encouraging many workers to behave rudely to one another, ostensibly in the name of efficiency and to project a "can-do" exterior.

"In a go-go economy, there's this kind of a macho thing going," said California-based industrial psychologist Gary Namie. "We're high-tech, we're high-speed, it's all about the speed of transmission. . . . It's social Darwinism, it's toughness, it's meanness."

Jenny Tomkins, until recently a reporter for Bloomberg News who covered international trade and foreign affairs, said she found some people at the White House and State Department to be "the rudest people" she had ever met, particularly when they were under stress.

"A lot of people can't manage their adrenaline rush," said Tomkins, who left journalism to become a paralegal at a Fairfax County law firm. "There's no 'Thank you.' They are very gruff. People in a power position can have a certain amount of arrogance, and the civilities of life are thrown right out the window."

Some experts attribute the problem, on occasion, to interpersonal conflict. Behavior that one person may perceive as cold, brusque or rude, another may view as a no-nonsense, competent or efficient manner. Workers of different cultures or backgrounds may react very differently to the same behavior. Thus, as the workplace becomes more diverse, the potential for misunderstandings or unintended offenses may multiply.

The issue is attracting growing attention overseas as well. An international conference recently was held at Staffordshire University in England to bring together personnel executives and academics to talk about what Europeans call workplace "bullying," and to develop ways to coach managers in how to defuse it.

The problem can hurt productivity, according to a survey released last month by the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler School of Business.

Christine Pearson, a management professor at the school, surveyed 775 people who told her they had been targets of what Pearson described as "rude, insensitive, discourteous behavior" at the office. Men and women equally reported that they had been targets. The people they described as the instigators were, on average, about seven years older than the target, mostly male and usually higher-ranking than the target.

The people who said they had been targeted told Pearson their productivity declined as a result of the perceived mistreatment. About 53 percent said they lost work time worrying about the incidents, 22 percent said they decreased their effort at work and 10 percent said they cut back on the hours they worked. Almost half said they considered quitting or changing their jobs because of the incidents; about 12 percent actually did so.

"There's a bottom-line cost to all this," Pearson said. "It goes beyond potential hurt feelings. We've got data that shows people cut back the amount of time they work and reduced their commitment to work."

One woman, for example, a 17-year veteran at a company that employed 25,000 people, told Pearson she left the firm because the division president above her was verbally abusive to her and others, and upper management did nothing to stop it. For instance, she said she once was asked to make a presentation to the firm's international managers and vice presidents. But the division president interrupted her by shouting, "No one is interested in this stuff." She described feeling humiliated in front of her colleagues.

One man, a 37-year-old accountant, told Pearson that he is still angry about an incident that occurred soon after he was hired to oversee the payroll for a 1,200-employee firm. The man said he made a mistake entering a number into the computer, and the company's information services supervisor insulted him as incompetent in front of his new boss. Since then, the employee said, he has avoided the information supervisor, leaving some problems undetected and unresolved.

Keashly, of Wayne State University, has focused her research on what happens after repeated incidents of incivility. She said some workers become physically ill or suffer depression and anxiety. Some European researchers, she said, believe unrelenting workplace abuse can sometimes lead workers to commit suicide.

Neuman said workplace aggression can cause psychological problems. "I'd rather be physically pushed, hit or slammed than verbally demeaned over a long period of time," he said.

Neuman said top executives often help create the problem by speaking disparagingly of their workers, which leads lower-level supervisors to imitate their management style. At one firm, for example, he said that after a morale-crushing downsizing, the personnel department began referring to the workers who remained as the company's "backfill."

"Of course, that'll have an effect," Neuman said. He said executives need to demonstrate "there's no tolerance" for disrespectful comments about workers, or the tone of discussion can deteriorate throughout an entire organization.

Keashly said her research indicates that people treat others the way they are treated themselves. She said many medical students are verbally abused by clinical faculty and nurses while they are training. When those students become doctors, they, in turn, treat nurses and incoming medical students abusively.

"It sounds like a cycle," she said. "If you got mistreated when you were a student, you carry it through."

She advised workers who are being mistreated at work to begin documenting the incidents, noting specific information about what happened and when, so they can present top executives with a detailed record of events if it becomes necessary. It helps reveal isolated, seemingly innocuous events as a pattern of behavior, she said.

But, Keashly said, workers should not be naive enough to believe that if they complain, the problem will necessarily be fixed. She said some workers who treat co-workers rudely have achieved what she called "idiosyncrasy credits" that cause their interpersonal problems to be overlooked because they are valued for their other contributions to the organization.

Keashly said some managers are baffled about what they can, or should, do to stop extreme incivility. "My impression is that when people higher up in an organization hear about it, they frankly don't know what to do," she said.

Top 10 Acts of Rudeness

Based on his interviews and surveys of workers, Joel H. Neuman, director of the Center for Applied Management at the State University of New York at New Paltz, developed a list of the most commonly cited aggressive behaviors in the workplace: