Personality traits of bullies as a contributory factor in workplace bullying: An exploratory study

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between personality characteristics - as indexed by the ICES Personality Inventory (Bartram, 1994; 1998) and the IBS Clinical Inventory (Mauger, Adkinson, Zoss, Firestone & Hook, 1980) - and bullying behavior. Although it proved to be difficult to obtain a large enough sample of bullies, the findings indicated that bullies are aggressive, hostile, and extraverted and independent. Furthermore, bullies are egocentric, selfish, and show little concern for the opinions of others. High levels of aggressiveness, assertiveness, competitiveness and independence are traits that are also associated with leadership.

Bullying as Circuits of Power

“…These conventional agent-based views of conflict-based bullying (Harvey et al, 2009;Pfeffer, 1992) interpret power as a force by certain actors to exercise control over others. Accordingly, bullying has largely been explained in terms of the personality traits or the emotional instability of individuals that predisposes them toward negative emotion acted out as bullying (Moayed et al, 2006;Parkins, Fishbein, & Ritchey, 2006;Seigne et al, 2007). However, empirical evidence does not always support this.…”

“…To date, most understandings of workplace bullying have drawn from the fields of organizational psychology, with bullying having largely been interpreted as a form of escalated interpersonal conflict (Zapf & Einarsen, 2005) assumed to stem from individual personalities (Seigne et al, 2007) and bullying-conducive environments (Pfeffer, 2007;Vardi & Weitz, 2004). Traditional models of power and conflict (Conrad, 1983) have theorized that conflict creates a situation where the personal power of one actor over another is sought and increased through bullying behaviors.…”

Understanding individual experiences of cyberbullying encountered through work

“…Theoretically, the notion of submissive victims seen in traditional bullying, where individuals are unable to defend themselves and hence become the target of a perpetrator's aggression (Coyne, 2011), may explain causal attributions to self in this sample. Perpetrators were seen as being emotionally unstable, aggressive, controlling and directive, which again links to research in traditional contexts (Ashforth, 1994;Seigne, et al 2007). Zapf and Einarsen (2003) theorised that perpetrators' low emotional control and lack of empathy could explain their engagement in bullying.…”

“…Similarly, perpetrator disposition in relation to tyrannical (Ashforth, 1994) or aggressive behaviour (Seigne et al, 2007) may predispose an individual to act in an aggressive manner. Recognising the complex nature to workplace bullying, recent developments in theoretical models have professed more of an interactional component between individual and organisational factors (Bowling and Beehr, 2006;Einarsen et al, 2010).…”

Bullying Among Hospital Staff: Use of Psychometric Triage to Identify Intervention Priorities

“…Personality approaches to workplace bullying have not been encouraging. Seigne, Coyne, Randall and Parker (2007) queried 300 adults, found 10 confessing to bullying workmates, and found their personality profiles to be similar to those of leaders, namely, extroverted, independent, aggressive. Glasø, Matthiesen, Nielsen and Einarsen (2007, p. 313) compared the personality profiles of 72 victims of workplace bullying with matched controls and concluded: "There is no such thing as a general victim's personality profile".…”