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This chapter looks at the discursive dimension of the working environment in research and higher education organizations; more specifically at neoliberal managerial discourse and at how it participates in shaping the way researchers, teachers and support staff perceive themselves and their experiences. It is based on a multiple case study and combines an intersectional and a socio-clinical approach. The empirical data is constituted by in-depth interviews with women conducted in Ireland and Chile, and includes some observations made in France. A thematic analysis of individual narratives of self-ascribed experiences of being bullied enables to look behind the veil drawn by managerial discourse, thus providing insights into power vectors and power domains contributing to workplace violence. It also shows that workplace bullying may reinforce identification to undervalued social categories. This contribution argues that neoliberal managerial discourse, by encouraging social representations of “neutral” individuals at work, or else celebrating their “diversity,” conceals power relations rooting on different social categories. This process influences one’s perception of one’s experience and its verbalization. At the same time, feeling assigned to one or more of undervalued social category can raise the perception of being bullied or discriminated against. While research has shown that only a minority of incidents of bullying and discrimination are reported within organizations, this contribution suggests that acknowledging the multiplicity and superposition of categories and their influence in shaping power relations could help secure a more collective and caring approach, and thus foster a safer work culture and atmosphere in research organizations.

In this paper the authors argue that organizational climate and workplace bullying are connected, intertwined and affect each other. More precisely, the focus of the present study is how a hostile climate at work is related to workplace bullying. A hostile work climate is defined as an affective organizational climate permeated by distrust, suspicion and antagonism. The authors tested four hypotheses about the reciprocal effects and possible gender differences.

The study is based on a longitudinal probability sample of the Swedish workforce (n = 1,095). Controlling for age, the authors used structural equation modelling and cross-lagged structural regression models to assess the reciprocal effects of a hostile work climate on workplace bullying. Gender was added as a moderator to test two of the hypotheses.

The results showed a strong reciprocal effect, meaning there were significant associations between a hostile work climate and subsequent bullying, β = 0.12, p = 0.007, and between baseline bullying and a subsequent hostile work climate, β = 0.15, p = 0.002. The forward association between a hostile work climate and bullying depended on gender, β = −0.23, p < 0.001.

The findings point to a possible vicious circle where a hostile work climate increases the risk of bullying, which in turn risks creating an even more hostile work climate. Furthermore, the findings point to gender differences in bullying, showing that the effect of a hostile work climate on workplace bullying was stronger for men.

The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships between perceived bullying, work engagement and work performance among Estonian academics. Specifically, it details what forms of bullying affect work engagement and performance. Moreover, the study explores the relationship between engagement and performance among bullied academics.

A total of 864 faculty members from nine Estonian universities participated in an e-mail survey in Spring 2014. Bullying was measured using the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R22), and work engagement was assessed using the nine-item Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. Respondents’ perceived performance and productivity were measured on a ten-point rating scale. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the relationship between bullying, engagement and performance.

Perceived bullying – especially “professional understating” – decreased work engagement and work performance among Estonian academics. The decrease in performance preceded the decrease in engagement or vice versa. The decrease in engagement was followed by lowered performance.

A longitudinal study is needed to prove the specific one-way effect of (decreased) performance (because of perceived bullying) on engagement.

Preventing bullying and further increasing engagement and performance among Estonian academics requires getting out of policy of professional understating.

The authors need to determine why Estonian academics experience professional understating, which includes being ordered to perform tasks below one’s level of competence and having key areas of responsibility removed or replaced with more trivial or unpleasant tasks.

The present results prove that it is possible to differentiate between specific forms of bullying in a specific context and further reveal those factors specifically that affect work performance and work engagement. Among Estonian academics – revealed in this study – “professional understating” seems to be such a factor.

This study aims to answer two research questions: first, to what extent can workplace bullying be explained by ageism? And second, does the likelihood of workplace bullying increase when age interacts with gender and ethnic minority?

The authors report results from a survey carried out in 11 organizations in Estonia (N = 1,614) using the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (Einarsen et al., 2009).

The results show that ageism does not explain bullying in Estonia. As in some earlier studies, older age correlates negatively with negative acts, and women report less work-related bullying than men. These findings were unexpected because Estonia's post-socialist background and the highest gender wage gap in Europe suggested otherwise. However, there is gendered ageism in work-related bullying such that older women report more negative acts in their workplace. Respondents from ethnic minority groups do not experience more bullying in general, nor in combination with age. Surprisingly, managers reported both person- and work-related bullying more than employees with no subordinates.

The study contributes to intersectionality literature with a view to workplace bullying in post-socialist study context.

Broadly understood as repeated, intentional, and aggressive behaviors facilitated by digital technologies, cyberbullying has been identified as a significant public health concern in Australia. However, there have been critical debates about the theoretical and methodological assumptions of cyberbullying research. On the whole, this research has demonstrated an aversion to accounting for context, difference, and complexity. This insensitivity to difference is evident in the absence of nuanced accounts of Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. In this chapter, we extend recent critiques of dominant approaches to cyberbullying research and argue for novel theoretical and methodological engagements with Indigenous people's experiences of cyberbullying. We review a range of literature that unpacks the many ways that social, cultural, and political life is different for Indigenous peoples. More specifically, we demonstrate there are good reasons to assume that online conflict is different for Indigenous peoples, due to diverse cultural practices and the broader political context of settler-colonialism. We argue that the standardization of scholarly approaches to cyberbullying is delimiting its ability to attend to social difference in online conflict, and we join calls for more theoretically rigorous, targeted, difference-sensitive studies into bullying.

Bullying affects at least one-third of the workers through either direct exposure or witnessing, both of which lead to compromised health, and as a result, reduced organizational effectiveness or productivity. However, there is very little evidence that organisations provide effective protection from bullying, and in fact, the converse appears to the case. The purpose of this paper to explore the role of both individual and organisational power in the creation and maintenance of the problem. Such an approach moves away from the specific practice of identifying “bullying” that typically engages targets and perpetrators in a dance that is really just around the edges (Sullivan, 2008) of a larger problem; a culture that permits the abuse of power and ill-treatment of workers, in both practices and through organisational politics.

This paper elucidates key problems with organisational response as identified in the literature and critically examines weak organisational response to workplace bullying using the power theory, arguing that while overt approaches to addressing bullying appear to be underpinned by a simplistic, functionalist understanding of power, practices on the ground are better explained by more sophisticated “second-dimension” theorists.

There is a need for organisations to move beyond the current individualistic understanding of bullying towards a more nuanced understanding of how anti-bullying policies and procedures are themselves an exercise in institutional power protecting and reinforcing dominant power structures.

The literature from which this paper is drawn is limited to studies published in English.

The authors advocate a realistic assessment of the role of both individual and organisational power in the creation and maintenance of workplace bullying, as a way forward to plan appropriate intervention.

Workplace bullying is problematic for organisations at several levels, and therefore for society.

That power is relevant to workplace bullying has been apparent since the work of Brodsky in 1976 and Einarsen's early work, this paper builds on a the more nuanced work of McKay (2014), D'Cruz and Noronha (2009), Liefooghe and MacDavey's (2010) and Hutchinson et al. (2010), exploring the organisational response to the raising of bullying issues by individual employees as an exercise of power.

The purpose of this paper aims to investigate the relationship between the audit firm's ethical climate and workplace bullying perceived by trainee auditors in Chinese audit firms.

An Ethical Climate Questionnaire and a Negative Acts Questionnaire are adapted from the existing organization studies and business ethics literature to fit in the audit firm context and are administered in a survey on 205 trainee auditors with a four-month long work placement in audit firms. SPSS is used in statistical analyses and tests.

This study confirms that some but not all types of organizational ethical climate significantly affect the perceived workplace bullying in audit firms. The results of testing for the relations between workplace bullying and ethical climate after breaking down workplace bullying into the work-related and person-related bullying sub-categories provide some different conclusions. Besides the impacts of the ethical climate on workplace bullying, this paper also finds out that trainee auditor's gender, the leader–subordinate gender difference, firm size and audit engagement team size are more likely to affect the perception of one or more of the bullying categories in audit firms.

This study implies some guidance for the audit firms to establish healthy ethical climates that can help them to recruit, train and retain young skilled auditing professionals.

The findings of this study imply that a healthy ethical climate can help develop the audit profession and markets by deterring workplace bullying in audit firms.

This paper extends the organizational studies on the impact of the audit firm's organizational ethical climate on workplace bullying in the auditing profession. It also extends the gender roles in organization studies by stratifying the levels of workplace harassment.

Bullying negatively affects victims’ mental health and has been shown to be associated with anxiety and depression. Moreover, many studies have reported the prevalence of mistreatment among medical students (MS), interns and junior physicians. However, there are limited studies on bullying in the Middle East, and no studies on higher education in Bahrain. The authors’ aim was to investigate and compare the prevalence of bullying between MS at a major public university and non-medical students (NMS) at a private university in Bahrain. The authors also sought to explore the associations between bullying, depression and anxiety.

The authors conducted a survey-based cross-sectional study from October 1 to December 31, 2018, using convenient sampling method. A total of 300 students (150 MS and 150 NMS) participated in the study by answering a questionnaire that explored exposure to different types of bullying. In addition, standard anxiety and depression instruments were distributed to students.

The results showed that MS were more exposed to bullying than NMS, with a significant number (41%) reporting mistreatment from multiple sources, including teachers, consultants and peers. Furthermore, the authors found that bullying was significantly correlated with psychological health, anxiety and depression.

There are limited studies on bullying in the Middle East and no studies on the topic of higher education in Bahrain. Furthermore, the learning environment of tertiary education institutions can be improved by addressing the concerns associated with bullying identified in this study.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how knowledge hoarding, functions as antecedent and consequent of work related negative acts, as a measure of bullying. The authors investigate the relation as mediated by trust and justice.

Data stem from a longitudinal study in which questionnaire responses were collected twice from 1,650 employees in 52 workplaces. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the two models. Design-based corrections were made to accommodate the multi-level structure of data.

The analyses showed that knowledge hoarding was both an antecedent and a consequent of negative acts. First, over time, knowledge hoarding was indirectly related to negative acts mediated by trust and justice. Second, negative acts were both directly and indirectly related to knowledge hoarding over time. The study thus points to the existence of a vicious circle of negative acts, psychological states of trust and justice, and knowledge hoarding behaviours, which presumably will affect both individual and organizational outcomes negatively.

The use of already collected, self-report data, single-item measures, and the two-year time lag could pose potential limitations to the study.

Preventive and repair actions could potentially impact both negative acts and knowledge hoarding by focusing on increasing the social exchange quality at work unit level.

This paper combines two strands of research, that of bullying at work and that of knowledge management, within which research on knowledge hoarding has been an under-researched area.

The hospitality industry is one of Ghana's key economic contributors. It is an industry that has significant indigenous investment. The sector also brings in foreign exchange for Ghana. In 2019, it generated $325 m through tourist visits. This makes the hospitality industry critical for the attraction of foreign direct investments. The research was therefore aimed at examining the business environment of the hospitality industry for evidence of negative factors that can hamper its greater contribution to the attainment of Goal 8 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN such as guest-bullying and the incivility in hospitality occupations.

A convenience sampling method was used to select 346 samples out of the accessible 3,500 targeted population from 38 hotels in the capital city of Ghana, Accra, comprising of junior to senior employees of various departments. The questionnaires were scripted from a paper-based to digital format supported by the Opine software installed on tablets and smartphones, to enable complete adherence to all coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) safety protocols. The study used a regression to ascertain the relationships between the dependent variables and the independent variables.

The study found the “Level of Permissiveness for Guests” positively and significantly “encouraged” guests to bully staff, while “Management and Staff Laxity” negatively but significantly explained guest bullying behaviour.

The study makes the first attempt in context to shed light on workplace bullying which represents one of the main factors that can inhibit or erode any gains or attempts to foster the achievement of Goal 8 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN which is to create “Decent Work and Economic Growth”.