Abstract
Workplace bullying is an extreme social stressor at work leading to a severe deterioration of health amongst its targets. Research has revealed two important orders of factors that may trigger workplace bullying: Poor working conditions and individual factors such as impaired mental health that determine a personal psychological vulnerability to bullying. However, research has rarely investigated their role simultaneously. In response, we investigated whether the relationship between poor working conditions (i.e., high job demand) at time 1 (T1) and the experience of bullying at time 2 (T2) is strengthened by experiencing symptoms of impaired mental health at T1. We also tested whether job control—which contributes to better working conditions—at T1 moderates the relationship between job demand at T1 and bullying at T2. Participants (N = 235) were workers in the health sector. The time lag between T1 and T2 was one year. Cross-lagged path analysis revealed that the relationship between job demand at T1 and the experience of bullying behavior at T2 was strengthened by T1 impaired mental health. This suggests that considering both working conditions and individual factors together may be important for reaching a better understanding of the development of bullying.
Highlights
Workplace bullying is a peculiar form of interpersonal conflict in the workplace [1] defined as the systematic and persistent/repetitive experience of negative behavior at work, such as being withheld information that affects performance, being a target of rumors, or being socially isolated [2]
As participants in the sample were clustered in 16 different departments, before conducting the main analysis, we calculated the amount of variance in time 2 (T2) bullying explained by departmental membership
1.567, ns), from time 1 (T1) bullying to T2 job demand was not significant, excluding excluding reverse causation
Summary
Workplace bullying is a peculiar form of interpersonal conflict in the workplace [1] defined as the systematic and persistent/repetitive experience of negative behavior at work, such as being withheld information that affects performance, being a target of rumors, or being socially isolated [2]. Workplace bullying has very negative consequences for the target’s mental health and for the work organization as well [3,4,5]. Bullying can be triggered by poor working conditions [6,7]. That work stressors such as role conflict, workload, and lack of social support are related to bullying, even prospectively [8,9,10]. Very poor working conditions may elicit stress reactions and feelings of frustration [11].
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