Exposure to workplace bullying has been argued to be a severe social stressor and a more crippling and devastating problem for affected individuals than the effects of all other work-related stressors put together. However, few studies have explicitly investigated this assumption. In a representative sample of the Norwegian working population, the present study investigated the relative contribution of workplace bullying as a predictor of individual and organizational related outcomes after controlling for the well-documented job stressors of job demands, decision authority, role ambiguity and role conflict. Bullying was found to be a significant predictor of all the outcomes included, showing a substantial relative contribution in relation to anxiety and depression, while for job satisfaction, turnover intention and absenteeism, more modest relative contributions were identified. Workplace bullying is indeed a potent social stressor with consequences similar to, or even more severe than, the effects of other stressors frequently encountered within organizations. Thus, the finding that bullying has a considerable effect on exposed individuals also when controlling for the effects of other job stressors demonstrates bullying as a serious problem at workplaces that needs to be actively prevented and managed in its own right.
The present paper scrutinises the work environment hypothesis of bullying by examining relationships between psychosocial factors at work and bullying within departments on a group level of analysis, as compared to the many studies executed on an individual level of analysis. Relationships between quantitative demands, job control, role demands, leadership behaviour and social climate, and observed bullying were studied in a convenience sample consisting of 276 departments with a total of 4,064 respondents. Between-group bivariate correlations showed relatively strong relationships (r > .52) between the predictors social climate, leadership behaviour, and role demands, respectively, and observed bullying in the department. A two-factor higher-level model was formulated for the independent variables yielding two latent factors reflecting an interpersonal domain and a task-oriented domain, where the former was strongly associated with observed bullying at a group level of analysis (Beta = -.73), while the last factor yielded an insignificant contribution. The results confirm that a poor social work environment exists within departments in which bullying takes place, hence, yielding further support to the work environment hypothesis. In line with the present results, future studies on workplace bullying should include a group level of analysis.
Brita Bjørkelo, for keeping up with me during these four years. All members of the Bergen Bullying Research Group, for your kind support. Helga Marie Meling, for appreciated help with all sorts, all the time. Professor Oddrun Samdal, without whom there would be no thesis.
Environmental conditions have long been assumed to create climates that can encourage workplace bullying. Although several studies have supported this assumption, the vast majority have applied the individual as the unit of both measurement and analysis. We argue, however, that the appropriate level of inference regarding environmental conditions is the work-group. In a large sample of some 10,000 employees distributed across 685 departments, we tested the hypothesis that leadership practices and the presence of role stressors will predict the incidence of bullying within departments. The results showed leadership practices and role conflict to predict bullying at the departmental level, while role ambiguity did not when taking into account the effects of the other predictors. The robustness of the findings was demonstrated after excluding responses of targets of bullying, still showing leadership practices and role conflict as potent predictors of bullying, supporting the assumption that bullying will be prevalent within unfavorable working environments.
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