Making Sense of Supervisory Bullying: Perceived Powerlessness, Empowered Possibilities

Abstract

Workplace aggression harms targeted workers, witnessing bystanders, and organizations. An emerging area of interest for organizational communication scholars is workplace bullying, a persistent harmful type of aggression. The current study examined supervisory bullying (the most common type of bullying in U.S. workplaces), specifically how targeted employees (targets) made sense of why it happened. We explored sensemaking in the face of supervisory bullying and the framing vocabularies that inform sensemaking to determine if these partially constituted the widespread perceptions of powerlessness associated with the phenomenon. Targets most often believed that bullying occurred because perpetrators (actors) were mentally ill, evil, and power-hungry. Nearly as frequently, they pointed to upper management's failure to intervene. Sensemaking drew heavily on individualism and the belief in all-knowing, all-powerful upper management. Other explanations implicated targets, coworkers, and society. These suggested sensemaking shifts that might constitute the phenomenon and responses to it in more empowering ways.