Who Is the Wolf and Who Is the Sheep? Toward a More Nuanced Understanding of Workplace Incivility

Cortina, Rabelo, and Holland's ( 2018 ) perspective on studying victimization in organizations is a welcome contribution to workplace aggression research. We share their believe that considering a perpetrator predation paradigm may advance and proliferate research on issues related to gender harassment, bullying, mobbing, and other explicitly overt forms of victimization where the intent to harm is supposedly clear. However, we propose that, if blindly adopted, neither the dominant victim precipitation paradigm nor the suggested perpetrator predation paradigm will improve research on incivility or other more covert and indirect forms of victimization. In fact, we suggest in our commentary that both models may be counterproductive for understanding and remedying incivility in organizations.