Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between bullying and burnout and its effect on professional football players. Although the effects of both bullying and burnout have been studied in different contexts, the effects of these constructs have not been fully examined among professional football players in culturally different environments.

To measure bullying, the authors used a modified version of the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R) adapted to the professional football environment. To measure burnout, we used Raedeke and Smith’s (2001) “Athlete Burnout Questionnaire”. Data for the study (n=102) were collected from the professional football players in the Turkish Secondary Football League. Explatory and confirmatory analysis were performed for validity and reliability of the questionnaires. Correlations and hierarchical regression analysis were performed for data.

Our findings showed that bullying influenced all three dimensions of burnout (reduced sense of accomplishment, emotional/physical exhaustion, and devaluation), particularly the emotional/physical exhaustion. High levels of burnout that the victims might experience because of bullying may reduce individual performance as well as team performance. Furthermore, higher levels of burnout contribute to attrition (losing a well-performing player prematurely), which could have a significant effect on team’s overall performance and competitiveness.

This study utilized the “Negative Acts Questionnaire-Football (NAQ-F)” adapted from the “Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R)”. Using NAQ-F, this study tested the relationship between bullying and burnout and its effect on professional football players. The study results showed that to reduce the negative consequences of potential bullying behaviour on players and teams, high-performing professional football clubs should develop social networks and mechanisms to minimize the effects of such behaviours and/or provide the needed support to the victims, as needed.

Purpose: Previous research identified a measurement gap in the individual assessment of social misconduct in the workplace related to gender. This gap implies that women respond to comparable self-reported acts of bullying or sexual discrimination slightly more often than men with the self-labeling as “bullied” or “sexually discriminated and/or harassed.” This study tests this hypothesis for women and men in the scientific workplace and explores patterns of gender-related differences in self-reporting behavior.

Basic design: The hypotheses on the connection between gender and the threshold for self-labeling as having been bullied or sexually discriminated against were tested based on a sample from a large German research organization. The sample includes 5,831 responses on bullying and 6,987 on sexual discrimination (coverage of 24.5 resp. 29.4 percentage of all employees). Due to a large number of cases and the associated high statistical power, this sample for the first time allows a detailed analysis of the “gender-related measurement gap.” The research questions formulated in this study were addressed using two hierarchical regression models to predict the mean values of persons who self-labeled as having been bullied or sexually discriminated against. The status of the respondents as scientific or non-scientific employees was included as a control variable.

Results: According to a self-labeling approach, women reported both bullying and sexual discrimination more frequently. This difference between women and men disappeared for sexual discrimination when, in addition to the gender of a person, self-reported behavioral items were considered in the prediction of self-labeling. For bullying, the difference between the two genders remained even in this extended prediction. No statistically significant relationship was found between the frequency of self-reported items and the effect size of their interaction with gender for either bullying or sexual discrimination. When comparing bullying and sexual discrimination, it should be emphasized that, on average, women report experiencing a larger number of different behavioral items than men.

Interpretation and relevance: The results of the study support the current state of research. However, they also show how volatile the measurement instruments for bullying and sexual discrimination are. For example, the gender-related measurement gap is considerably influenced by single items in the Negative Acts Questionnaire and Sexual Experience Questionnaire. The results suggest that women are generally more likely than men to report having experienced bullying and sexual discrimination. While an unexplained “gender gap” in the understanding of bullying was found for bullying, this was not the case for sexual discrimination.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationships between leadership styles of primary school principals and organizational health and bullying.

Two hypotheses were formulated in relation to the research. Three instruments were used – a multi‐level questionnaire for measuring leadership, an Organizational Health Inventory (OHI‐S), and a negative acts questionnaire (NAQ) for measuring workplace bullying. The questionnaires were administered to 500 teachers working in primary schools in Turkey. Path analysis was conducted using the AMOS programs; other statistical analyses were conducted via LISREL and EQS 6.1 programs.

There is a positive relationship between transformational leadership acts of principals and organizational health and a negative relationship between the transformational leadership acts of principals and workplace bullying. While a reverse relationship between organizational health and workplace bullying is identified, there is a relationship between transactional leadership acts of principals and organizational health. No relationship between transactional leadership acts of principals and workplace bullying is found.

These results suggest the desirability of principals striving to improve transformational leadership behaviors in order to develop their schools as healthy organizations and to solve the problem of bullying therein.

Several resources are provided as tools, such as the NAQ, the OHI‐S, and the multifactor leadership questionnaire. These may be profitably used in similar studies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of the linkages between such negative workplace behaviors as abusive supervision and coworker bullying (CB)/mobbing; also, the study explores the linkages between such negative behaviors and work-life outcomes.

The authors use “negative acts,” abusive supervision, and workplace bullying/mobbing and develop work-life outcomes scales to test a data set collected from randomly selected respondents in the Midwest of the USA. The two-stage data collection offsets common method variance.

The authors find evidence that American supervisors and employees commit negative behavioral acts rarely. However, the data analyses indicate that many significant relationships exist among negative acts, abusive supervision, CB/mobbing, and employee well-being.

Companies are reluctant to allow surveying their employees on the subject of negative acts. Therefore, respondents in this study are a random sample. Many statistically significant interrelationships were detected.

This study will reinvigorate discussion on workplace negative behaviors, bullying, and their effects on employee well-being.

Addressing and reducing negative workplace behaviors will reduce employee stress and anxiety and improve the quality of employees’ work and life.

The scales were selected and developed, and the data set was constructed specifically for this study; the interactions of negative acts, abusive supervision, CB and mobbing, and work-life outcomes are tested together in a workplace scenario for the first time.

This paper aims to propose an organizing framework of a possible relationship between working environment and bullying at work.

A total of 926 Italian employees completed the Majer D'Amato Organizational Questionnaire 10 (MDOQ10) and the Negative Acts Questionnaire Revised (NAQ‐R) in order to test the relationship between climate and bullying.

The study finds that organizational climate is a critical antecedent of bullying at work. Organizational climate dimensions at a singular level, and interaction among them, impact on bullying at work.

The impact of working environment on bullying at work is supported.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether person-related bullying, work-related bullying, and physically intimidating bullying predict three forms of job strain: physical exhaustion, work-related depression, and interpersonal counterproductive work behaviour (CWB-P).

The study surveyed a wide cross-section of employees across a number of private sector organisations in a small developing country in the Caribbean region.

The prevalence rate of workplace bullying in the current Caribbean sample was 54 per cent. The regression results revealed that person-related bullying and work-related were positively related to work-related depression, whereas physically intimidating bullying and work-related bullying were positively related to CWB-P. None of the three forms of bullying predicted physical exhaustion. When the overall workplace bullying composite was used, all three job strains were significantly predicted.

The study utilised a cross-sectional self-report survey research design which does not permit causal inferences to be made. Common method variance is a possible limitation due to the use of self-report measure but this was ruled out by a Harman’s single factor test. Longitudinal research using a mixture of subjective and objective measures is needed to further investigate these relationships reported here.

First, social and interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence training and development opportunities should be provided to both managers and employees as a means of developing individuals who are socially aware, interpersonally competent, and emotionally intelligent in their interactions with each other at work. Second, a zero-tolerance approach should be communicated throughout the organisation evidenced by clear and explicit organisational policies against these acts. Third, it would be of good practical value to establish health and safety committees to identify, assess and tackle various psychosocial and other hazards at work (e.g. workplace bullying).

The study utilised a three-dimensional model of bullying at work (as well as a composite form of bullying) for predicting three forms of job strains among employees in various Caribbean workplaces.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the direct and buffering effects of three workplace contextual factors – constructive leadership, perceived organizational support, and organizational anti‐bullying initiatives – on bullying and its relationships with relevant criteria. Further, the paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of organizational initiatives against bullying as perceived by targets and non‐targets.

Data were collected from 727 employees in nine New Zealand healthcare organizations. Of these, 133 employees were classified as bullied, as they had experienced at least two negative acts per week over the last six months.

Correlations revealed negative relationships between the three contextual work factors and bullying. Moderated regression showed that perceived organizational support buffered the relationship of bullying with self‐rated job performance, and that organizational initiatives against bullying buffered the relationship of bullying with both wellbeing and organizational commitment. Targets consistently gave lower ratings than non‐targets of the effectiveness of organizational initiatives to address bullying.

There is scant research on workplace factors that may reduce bullying and buffer its negative effects. This paper makes an original contribution in providing evidence of the importance of three contextual factors, and of buffering effects for perceived organizational support and organizational initiatives against bullying.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between ethical leadership and Ba Ling (霸凌) perceived by Certified Public Accounting (CPA) interns, and the influence of gender factor of leaders and followers on the relation. Moreover, Workplace Ba-Ling (职场霸凌, a derivation of workplace bullying) as a new conceptual idea, specifically extracted from Chinese context, is first taken into consideration.

This research is based on the questionnaire responses of accounting interns enrolled in a university-CPA firms cooperative education programs, and the classical Ethical Leadership Scale and Negative Acts Questionnaire were applied in the survey to get empirical results.

The empirical results reveal the fact that ethical leadership of the audit project teams is negatively related to workplace bullying perceived by the accounting interns working in the CPA firms. No significant impacts were found of the gender factor on workplace bullying and ethical leadership; however, the further breakdown of the gender factor into the four dimensions of the leader – follower gender differences lead to the significant difference of ethical leadership among the four redefined gender difference groups. The ranking order in terms of ethical leadership further proves that female leaders tend to show higher ethicality than male ones.

As public accounting industry has acted an important role throughout the drastic Chinese economic growth of more than three recent decades, this paper provides knowledge of the gender-differentiated relationship between ethical leadership and workplace bullying, which implies serious concerns to be given in the varied business and workplace contexts in China and other emerging economies.

There has been an increasing literature trend discussing workplace bully in Western business studies; however, rarely has existing literature addresses this kind of issue in the emerging economies like China, where workplace ethics has become a commonly criticized concern with the fast economic growth in recent decades. Additionally, this paper proposes the new Chinese term of Ba Ling corresponding with the Western workplace bullying.

Organizational change eliciting negative outcomes might play a role in the development of workplace bullying. The purpose of this paper is to examine the direct and the interaction effect of two particular negative outcomes of organizational change, such as high workload and job insecurity, on workplace bullying.

Participants in the study were 134 Italian workers who had just experienced an organizational change. A multiple regression analysis, using the stepwise method, was conducted to test for whether workload, job insecurity, and their interactions predicted workplace bullying.

Results show that high level of workload is related to workplace bullying; job insecurity is not directly related to workplace bullying; the interaction between high workload and job insecurity enhanced the risk for workplace bullying. In particular, when the level of job insecurity is high there is a stronger relationship between workload and bullying, compared to when the level of job insecurity is low.

The cross-sectional design applied does not allow inference on the causal relationships between the predictors and outcomes.

In order to decrease the occurrence of bullying, managers should avoid that employees experience high workload after organizational change by carefully designing the reengineering process. Additionally, they should try to reduce, as far as possible, employee perceptions of job insecurity.

The focus of the study is on the “survivors” after organizational change and on particular interaction of workplace bullying’s causes that could extremely enhance the risk of the phenomena.