What is Neglect

Communication at work often occurs among people from different power, culture, or language groups. Communicating with a difficult co-worker can become a major source of job dissatisfaction. This chapter introduces communication accommodation theory and the exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect model as theoretical lenses for exploring the case of a recent immigrant healthcare worker experiencing job dissatisfaction because of unsatisfying interactions with a co-worker. This chapter then applies these theoretical frameworks to discuss how tensions between co-workers can arise in communicative forms such as convergence, divergence, and overaccommodation and how an employee responds to a deteriorating work condition stemming from difficult interpersonal communication.