Does rudeness really matter in the workplace? Studies have established that rudeness in the workplace can lead to retaliatory and counterproductive behavior. However, there has been little research on how rude behaviors influence a victim€™s task performance. Such a study was conducted and the results published in the Academy of Management Journal (Oct. 2007). College students enrolled in a management course were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: rudeness condition (45 students) and control group (53 students).
Each student was asked to write down as many uses for a brick as possible in five minutes; this value (total number of uses) was used as a performance measure for each student. For those students in the rudeness condition, the facilitator displayed rudeness by berating the students in general for being irresponsible and unprofessional (due to a late-arriving confederate). No comments were made about the late-arriving confederate for students in the control group. The number of different uses of a brick for each of the 98 students was recorded and the data saved in the RUDE file, shown in the next table.

Conduct a statistical analysis (at α = .01) to determine if the true mean performance level for students in the rudeness condition is lower than the true mean performance level for students in the control group. Use the results shown on the accompanying SAS printout to draw your conclusion

Control Group: 1 24 5 16 21 7 20 1 9 20 19 10 23 16 0 4 913 17 13 0 2 12 11 7 1 19 9 12 18 5 21 30 15 4 2 12 11 10 13 11 3 6 10 13 16 12 28 19 12 20 3 11 Rudeness Condition 10 7 8 9 10 7 11 4 13 5 4 7 8 3 8 15 9 16 10 0 7 15 13 9 2 13 10 Sanple Statistics Group Mean Std Dev Std. Error Control Rude 53 11.81132 7.3826 3.9322 1 0141 0.5951 Hypothes is Test Nul1 hypothes is: Mean 1-Hean 20 Mean 1Hean 2 0 Alternative If Variances Are Equal t statistic Df Pr > t 2.683 2.807 96 82.43 0.0043 0.0031 Not Equal 95% Confidence Interval for the Difference between Two Means Louer LinitUpper Linit 0.86 5.74