Beyond Bullying, Aggression, Discrimination, and Social Safety: Development of an Integrated Negative Work Behavior Questionnaire (INWBQ)

Abstract

Negative work behavior (NWB) threatens employee well-being. There are numerous constructs that reflect NWBs, such as bullying, aggression, and discrimination, and they are often examined in isolation from each other, limiting scientific integration of these studies. We aim to contribute to this research field by developing a diagnostic tool with content validity on the full spectrum of NWBs. First, we provide a full description of how we tapped and organized content from 44 existing NWB measurement instruments and 48 studies. Second, we discussed our results with three experts in this research field to check for missing studies and to discuss our integration results. This two-stage process yielded a questionnaire measuring physical, material, psychological, sociocultural, and digital NWB. Furthermore, the questions include a range of potential actors of NWB, namely, internal (employees, managers) and external actors (clients, customers, public, and family members) at work and their roles (i.e., target, perpetrator, perpetrator’s assistant, target’s defender, outsider, and witness of NWBs). Finally, the questionnaire measures what type of harm is experienced (i.e., bodily, material, mental, and social harm).