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The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of organizational cynicism on prosocial voice and defensive silence and to verify the mediating role of workplace bullying in these relationships.

A cross-sectional survey design with a sample of 205 individuals was used in this study.

The hypotheses were confirmed as organizational cynicism plays a significant and negative influence on prosocial voice and a significant and positive influence on defensive silence. In addition, workplace bullying partially mediates both relationships.

This study contributes to a deeper understanding of organizational cynicism and workplace bullying influences on prosocial voice and defensive silence. It investigates a relationship that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has not been studied yet. It also contributes to the discussion regarding the close relationship between prosocial voice and defensive silence.

The study aims to estimate the prevalence of workplace bullying, personal and work-related impacts, reporting practices for bullying, and the reasons for not reporting bullying incidents in the New Zealand pharmacy sector.

An online survey was conducted among registered pharmacists and pharmacist interns in New Zealand from June to August 2020. The questionnaire comprises both close-ended and semi-structured free-text questions. Goldberg’s 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) assessed the respondents’ general psychological health status, and a 22-item Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R) was used to estimate bullying prevalence together with the self-rated/self-labeled questions. The qualitative information obtained from the free-text responses was used to support and elaborate on the quantitative results.

The self-labeled prevalence of workplace bullying was 36.9%, with almost 10% reporting it occurring almost daily to several times per week. The 54.7% prevalence based on the NAQ-R assessment compares well with the prevalence of witnessing the incidents (58.5%). Psychological distress symptoms were experienced by 37.1% in pre-COVID and 45.3% during COVID-year 1. Supervisors or direct managers were the commonest perpetrators (32.7%). Only 28.8% of those who experienced bullying had reported the incidents formally.

This study is cross-sectional, and the relationships indicated are bi-directional. The consistency of the results is reassuring, however inferring causality of effect is challenging. Future studies and analyses should focus on this. This study suggests that in the pharmacy environment bullying from the top is reasonably prevalent, is not commonly reported and requires the design and implementation of prevention and management strategies that take into account and mitigate these bullying factors. Professional pharmacy leadership organizations, National Health Authority and Pharmacy regulators could play a significant role in awareness and training to reduce bullying with the development and promotion of strategies to curb it and improve reporting.

This is the first paper to describe the prevalence and impact of workplace bullying, and the practices of reporting bullying incidents in the New Zealand pharmacy sector. Based on empirical evidence, pharmacists represent a small share of total healthcare workforce, yet the overall prevalence of bullying is consistent with professions with much larger numbers such as medicine and nursing.

This study aims to examine the extent to which organizational dissent predicts perception of workplace bullying. As previous studies have reported inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results regarding the interaction between the reporting of bullying and demographic variables, these variables are examined in the New Zealand context. Organizational communication research provides considerable insight into the ways individuals make sense of and resist workplace bullying through juxtaposition with the concepts of dissent and intragroup conflict.

A nationally representative sample of managers in New Zealand (n = 239) was conducted. Surveys included demographic questions and the following measures: Organizational Dissent Scale and Negative Acts Questionnaire Revised Scale.

Key results and indications for further research are highlighted by the third model in this study. First, workers who reported they engaged in either articulated dissent or latent dissent were more likely to perceive workplace bullying. Second, workers who are more likely to express contrary opinions in the workplace are more likely to recognize, acknowledge and tolerate less positive interactions in the workplace such as bullying.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to analyze dissent and bullying in the New Zealand context. Second, this research raises the question of whether there is a conflation of work-related bullying behaviors and bad leadership styles that may not be targeted (e.g. authoritative leadership and micromanaging). Finally, communication research provides a distinctive contribution by exploring the narrative form of worker responses to perceived bullying. In this manuscript, the authors examine potential predictors on the perception of workplace bullying in the context of New Zealand, particularly focus on the relationship between dissent and the perception of workplace bullying.

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.

Workplace bullying generates various emotions, including shame in the target; these emotions can induce employee silence. However, the role of shame in the relationship between workplace bullying and employee silence, and the individual differences in how victims experience shame and silence, has not yet been explored. The present study aims to fill this gap in the literature, using the effect of shame as a mediator and core self-evaluation (CSE) as a moderator.

Two thousand faculty members working in different colleges in India were invited to participate in the online survey. The participants were invited to fill in the questionnaire only if they had experienced shame by bullying during the preceding two weeks. Three hundred and twenty faculty members responded to the survey.

The results showed that shame mediates the relationship between workplace bullying and diffident silence. In addition, CSE moderates the relationship between shame and diffident silence but not the relationship between workplace bullying and shame. That is, diffident silence induced by shame was noted to be weaker for employees with high CSE. Importantly, the study could not find any individual difference in experiencing shame by bullying.

Improved CSE can effectively influence diffident silence through shame, helping the management to recognize workplace bullying.

It is a unique attempt to address diffident silence among Indian academicians, and study the role of targets’ shame and CSE while adopting silence on workplace bullying.

The purpose of the article is to provide further evidence for the work environment hypothesis. According to the work environment hypothesis and as documented by empirical evidence, organizational factors play a crucial role in the development of workplace bullying. However, to better understand and prevent bullying at work and establish sustainable, responsible and ethical workplaces, it is crucial to understand which organizational factors are particularly important in the development of bullying and how these factors, independently and combined, act as precursors to bullying over time. One prominent theory that explains how organizational and individual factors interact is the affective events theory (AET).

In a two-wave, time-lagged study (N = 364), the authors apply AET to test and explain the interplay of organizational factors in the development of bullying at work.

The results revealed that supportive and fair leadership moderates the relationship between role stress and exposure to workplace bullying.

Knowledge of the buffering role of supportive and fair leadership practices is important when implementing organizational interventions aimed at preventing bullying at work.

Although previous studies have shown the general protecting effects of supportive leadership on exposure to bullying, the current study indicates that high level of supportive and fair leadership practices decreases the level of exposure to bullying, even when role ambiguity and role conflict are relatively high.

This study aims to examine the role of mental health disorders (anxiety and depression) underlying the relationship between bullying and absenteeism. Moreover, the author tested the potentially moderating role that job autonomy, supervisor and colleagues’ support may play in the relationship between bullying and mental health disorders.

A moderated mediation analysis was conducted with a sample of French workers, controlling for their individual characteristics and their working conditions. The sample comprised 22,661 employees. This sample is representative of the French working population.

The results showed that the positive relationship between workplace bullying and absenteeism was partially mediated by anxiety and depression. In addition, job autonomy and supervisor support appear to be moderators of bullying effects. Regarding the moderating role of colleagues support, the study’s results are more nuanced.

Many studies show that exposure to workplace bullying increases the risk of developing mental health problems and sickness absence. This study extends previous studies by proposing a more comprehensive understanding of how and when bullying results in absenteeism. In particular, this study identified some moderators that can mitigate the harmful effects of workplace bullying on mental health and absenteeism. This study contributes to the literature on this subject by showing that organizations can reduce the potentially negative effects of workplace bullying. Organizational resources can help make individuals capable of coping with aggression. They thus contribute to their resilience.

A workplace bullying dynamic involving multiple individuals targeting victims can lead to the victim losing emotional bonds or affect-based trust with their colleagues, resulting in employee silence. The literature has largely ignored this negative aspect of social dynamics. This study aims to examine the relationship between workplace bullying and employee silence behaviors and determine whether affect-based trust mediates this relationship and whether climate for conflict management moderates the mediated relationship.

Hypotheses are tested using surveys and scenario-based experiments among faculty members in Indian Universities. There were 597 participants in the survey and 166 in the scenario-based experiment.

Results revealed that workplace bullying correlated positively with silence behaviors, and affect-based trust mediated the bullying-silence relationship. The hypothesized moderated mediation condition was partially supported as moderated the mediating pathway, i.e. indirect effects of workplace bullying on defensive silence and ineffectual silence via affect-based trust were weaker for employees with high climate for conflict management. However, the study failed to support the moderation of climate for conflict management in the relationship between workplace bullying and affect-based trust and workplace bullying and relational silence. The results of this moderated effect of climate for conflict management were similar in both studies.

This study is one of the few attempts to examine employee silence in response to workplace bullying in academia. Additionally, the study revealed a critical area of trust depletion associated with bullying and the importance of employee perceptions of fairness toward their institutions’ dispute resolution processes.

This study aims to broaden the understanding of the mechanisms through which workplace bullying might affect employees’ intention to leave the organisation, as well as the mediating role of burnout in the relationship between workplace bullying and turnover intention.

The sample included 884 employees from different Portuguese organisations operating in the tertiary sector and industry. This study uses structural equation modelling to evaluate the hypothesised model.

The results suggest that workplace bullying causes high levels of burnout in victims and increases their turnover intentions. The results further suggest that burnout fully mediates the effect of workplace bullying on turnover intentions.

Organisations should work to reduce these problems in workplace environments, focusing on HRM models that prevent the precursors of workplace bullying, particularly those associated with low determination of HR practices and the emphasis on employee participation. Implementing workplace ethical guidelines as part of an annual action plan can contribute to cultivating organisational cultures that reject any form of devaluation of human worth within the organisation.

There is little knowledge on the mediating role of burnout in the relationship between workplace bullying and turnover intention. This study answers the call for further empirical research from those who have argued that more information is needed and contributes to the growing debate on this topic and its effects on Portuguese employees. This study seeks to fill these gaps by developing a model of workplace bullying and its consequences and exploring burnout’s potential mediating role.

This study aims to examine the direct influence of workplace bullying (WB) on internal auditors’ independence using the nexus between the agency theory and social exchange theory. From the internal auditors’ perspective, the investigation covered both government and private colleges and universities in one of the Middle East countries.

A survey was administered and delivered to internal auditors at each of the 85 educational institutions. A total of 267 valid questionnaires were analysed. The study’s measurement and structural models were tested and evaluated by using SmartPLS v.4 and partial least squares-structural equation modelling.

The study results indicated that bullying is common among senior managers, and that it has a significant, negative, high-level and direct effect on the independence of internal auditors in the higher education sector.

Regulators and other stakeholders should make a deliberate effort to promote positive behaviours and abandon negative ones regarding the independence of internal auditors and the performance of audit teams, which play a crucial role in enhancing the efficiency of audit units. For example, enhancing coordination and communication internally and externally. In addition to providing the internal auditors with equitable advancement and learning opportunities, senior management should also support their professional development.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to examine the relationship between WB and the internal auditor’s independence in the context of government and private organisations in Southwest Asian countries.