Prevalence of workplace bullying and risk groups: a representative population study

Workplace bullying and sickness presenteeism: cross-sectional and prospective associations in a 2-year follow-up study

“…The external validity of our study could be also affected by the low response rate at baseline (45.7 %). However, strong selection bias at baseline seems unlikely given that the point prevalence of both workplace bullying (Ortega et al 2009) and SP (Eurofound 2012;Hansen and Andersen 2008) observed in our study was close to that observed in previous investigations on representative samples of the Danish workforce. A second possible limitation relates to the considerable dropout of participants at follow-up (49.5 %).…”

“…Bullying is an escalating process in the course of which the person confronted ends up in an inferior position and becomes the target of systematic negative social acts". A fairly recent study on a representative sample of the Danish workforce (Ortega et al 2009) has estimated an overall prevalence of workplace bullying of 8.3 %, with 1.6 % of the responders reporting frequent (i.e. weekly or daily) exposure.…”

Workplace Incivility in a Swedish Context

“…Studies have previously shown that managers or supervisors are reported to be the perpetrator in a majority of the cases (Hoel & Cooper, 2000). However, in a study of a representative Danish population, coworkers, more often than supervisors, were reported as bullies (Ortega et al, 2009). Similarly, in the present work, the high occurrence of coworker incivility could be due to the less hierarchical structure of Swedish organizations, and a lesser power distance to supervisors.…”

“…In studies by Hoel and Cooper (2000), it was found that in UK supervisors, more often than subordinates were the perpetrators of bullying. The opposite was found in a Danish population (Ortega et al, 2009). Scandinavian countries generally score higher on the dimension of femininity, in addition to having a lower degree of power difference than countries like the UK and USA (Lutgen-Sandvik et al, 2007), which potentially makes adverse behavior in Scandinavia less tied to hierarchical position.…”

Acts of offensive behaviour and risk of long-term sickness absence in the Danish elder-care services: a prospective analysis of register-based outcomes

“…Previous research has shown that the risk of workplace bullying is higher in workplaces that are either male or female dominated (Ortega et al 2009), and that the risk of experiences of violence or threats is most prevalent in human service jobs (Hogh and Viitasara 2005). Accordingly, employees in elder-care services-a female dominated human service job-should be expected to have a comparatively high risk of experiencing acts of offensive behaviour in the workplace.…”