(FORTUNE Magazine) – Office behavior, the way we treat colleagues at work, is one of those subjects that is difficult to raise without sounding prissy. It involves, dare I say it, courtesy. You know: "Ms. Fortune believes that one should always say please and thank you, because not doing so would be Very Bad Manners." Okay, I'm prissy and would never neglect my manners. Unless, of course, I forget, which I often do because I'm busy. That's a big part of the problem: We're all too busy -- and stressed. The result is that something very unpleasant is going on in offices today that is leaving us all with ambient anger we are beginning to vent on each other. I am driven crazy by the following telephone exchange: "Hello, this is Julie Connelly from FORTUNE returning Joe Green's call. Is he there?" Joe's assistant or secretary or whoever picks up the phone on the eighth ring answers: "No, Julie. Mr. Green is out." As a woman, maybe I'm just more touchy about this automatic effort to put me in my place than a man would be. And, you might reasonably ask, what do I expect to be called? "Your Highness" would be nice, but I chose the wrong parents for that, so how about "you"? As in "No, Mr. Green is out until four o'clock. Would you like to leave a message?" But what really has me gripping my desk in silent fury is a variant of this exchange: "Hello, this is Julie Connelly, etc. etc. Is he there?" "No." That's it. Flat and cold. Ah, says St. Louis consultant Nancy Friedman, who trains corporate clients in telephone courtesy as the Telephone Doctor: "It's replies like that that keep me in business." As for my reply, I hear myself snarling in a tone chilly enough to freeze vodka: "Tell him I returned his call." You can bet old Joe is going to get an earful if he ever does call me back. Speaking of which, how about those calls that we didn't return and the letters we forgot to answer. We'd probably feel pretty guilty -- if we had the time. What with the average workweek approaching 50 or 60 hours, no one means to be rude, but we're all just working so flat-out. Your department has half the people doing twice the work it did before you got right-sized. And now that the higher-ups have emerged from their recessionary funk to green-light additional projects, try hiring someone to help you.

SMALL WONDER behavior in the office is becoming less than civil. It's as if the free-floating hostility of big-city streets -- where a red light is just an excuse to keep going and the vagrants panhandle aggressively -- had finally permeated the steel scaffolding and sheetrock that separates office workers from everyone else. Business used to be the last bastion of civility. Where else, outside the military, did men and women rise when their seniors entered the room? Certainly not at home for Dad. And where else outside a $100-a- person lunch in an expense account sort of French restaurant did men usually wear suits and ties and women hose? Certainly not in church anymore. Civility is simply treating others with respect -- otherwise known as courtesy. When it is absent, working relations become frayed. Just as the cabdriver, stressed out from navigating the mean streets, gives you the finger when he thinks your tip isn't sufficient, so executives are starting to bully one another. At a meeting of chief executives last year, one highly regarded boyar suggested "public floggings in the town square" for managers who didn't embrace change. And he didn't smile. When this kind of confrontational attitude is encouraged, as it increasingly is, it's not long before incivility can rise to the level of abuse. A senior officer at a money-center bank threw an ashtray at a subordinate who irritated him -- lousy aim, fortunately, or he might be doing a little time for manslaughter. But instead of being rebuked, he was promoted shortly thereafter. Over a third of the 479 human-resource managers who responded to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management last year said that one or more violent acts have been committed by employees at their companies since 1989 and that more than 80% of these incidents happened since 1991. Three- quarters of the episodes were fistfights or other physical altercations, like throwing things. Those outside the company can be subjected to another kind of abuse, in which the law of buy and sell overrides the rules for civilized conduct. Job seekers are especially vulnerable. Consider the senior executive who was discussing taking a $300,000-a-year position with the consulting arm of a large accounting firm. He was a specialist in a particular industry, and the firm asked him to prepare a detailed business plan for the work it might do in this field. Against the advice of more wary friends, he cooked up a plan and sent it off. Then he waited. . . and waited. . . and waited. He wrote a letter, hoping to prompt a response. Nothing. Three of his phone calls went unreturned, but on his fourth try he caught the elusive fellow who had requested the plan, only to be dispatched with a curt "Sorry. We've decided not to go forward." Rude? You bet. But, hey, this is business. Marilyn Moats Kennedy, publisher of the newsletter Kennedy's Career Stragtegist in Wilmette, Illinois, notes that these days you can actually give organizations civility ratings. Check the number of people with their heads bent over their work, especially first thing in the morning. If most employees are standing around having a cup of coffee at 9:05 and chatting pleasantly, that's good. But as the unwritten contract of lifetime employment in exchange for loyalty runs through the shredder, workers can become bitter, which they express by heading directly to their desks with quick nods to others. "Nobody under siege has time for the pleasantries," Kennedy says.

AN IMPORTANT proximate cause of heightened incivility is reengineering, by now the Great Satan of corporate life. As it flattens hierarchical structures into teams and matrix organizations, figuring out how to behave when there aren't any obvious cues to rank and seniority becomes difficult. The leader of a team can be an executive assistant or an executive vice president, and supervisors don't give orders, they coach members to reach consensus. But for teams to function, the members need good interpersonal skills. "There are parallels to families in teams," says Charles C. Manz, professor of management at Arizona State University. "If the members are difficult, either that gets resolved or the family disintegrates as a unit." Confusion can reign. Says consultant Gerald Ross of Change Laboratory International in Greenwich, Connecticut: "Employees have lost the sense of who they report to." One result is that they're back to concentrating on Me, Me, Me. That's why people believe they don't have to return phone calls or respond to memos or even R.S.V.P. to dinner invitations. They think they're too busy -- and maybe they are. While New York City consultant Dee Soder was visiting a client, she overheard one executive say to another who had just returned from his father's funeral: "Gee, sorry to hear about your dad. Were you able to do any work on the flight?"

OTHER FORCES are also tearing down the notion that people are entitled to be treated with respect. Business has started reflecting the informality of society at large -- basically a good trend because it eases communication. But the expression of that informality is often twisted into a self-centered "Why should I bestir myself for you? You're just the same as I am." So no one budges to pick up a ringing phone two desks away. Though they would have gagged had they imagined it at the time, many Woodstock children are today in senior corporate positions. This is the group that grew up on the notion that my right to express myself stops only at the tip of your nose. They considered manners elitist, and no one was entitled to impose his or her personal values on anyone -- that was being "judgmental." Now the children of the Woodstock children are entering the work force, and they too have grown up with the freedom to express themselves. Thus, a Generation X-er went to discuss a project with his boss, and as she spoke to him, he began rooting through her in-box. He was curious to see what was there and was startled when she told him crisply to cut it out.

Maybe Corporate America is asking for it. Thomas Sharkey, associate dean of the University of Toledo's College of Business, points out that society rewards people for confrontation. "Look at the talk shows on television, Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes," he says. Or the in-your-face Sam Donaldson. Viewers love them. The students selected for the University's MBA program "are competitive and ambitious," Sharkey says, adding that "MBA programs still emphasize competitive rather than collaborative models." While participative management that stresses collaboration and cooperation is getting more play in the classroom, not all the students buy in. "There's still a lot of confrontation out there," Sharkey believes. When incivility becomes the norm, the effect on companies is the moral equivalent of red ink. Mentoring, the way the corporate culture is passed down from worker to worker, declines. Why take the risk of helping someone who might snatch your job? This is particularly serious for people already working at a disadvantage, says human-resource consultant Andrew Sherwood of Goodrich & Sherwood in New York City. Without mentoring, how will women and minorities get ahead on white male terrain?

WORSE, a potentially explosive conflict develops between treating customers well and mistreating the employees who are your link to them. According to Telephone Doctor Nancy Friedman, "Employees say their managers tell them to use please and thank you when they talk to customers. But the managers never say please and thank you to the employees." Personality clashes become common in an environment where employees deal roughly with each other, further draining productivity. Accountemps, a New York City firm that provides temporary financial workers, surveyed executives from the nation's 1,000 largest companies three years ago and discovered they spent over 13% of their time -- the equivalent of 61/2 weeks a year -- resolving conflicts between workers, up from 9% in 1986. And when everybody is on the lookout for No. 1, disagreements can escalate into sexual harassment, whistle blowing, and litigation. Stephen Ban, vice president of marketing for Heller Financial in Chicago, expresses a common yearning when he says: "Doing business ought to be pleasant. It ought to be civilized. At the end of the day there ought to be more than whether we made a fair profit." That "more" is the difference between civilization and the jungle.