Practitioners’ blame patterns and intervention measures for workplace bullying complaints

Abstract

Organizational practitioners must often interpret accounts of workplace bullying as non-observing third parties. However, they are often reluctant to confirm the target’s account and often fail to set effective intervention measures. Building on novel approaches in attribution theory (multi-/conjunctive and relational attributions), this study explores how causal explanations and blame shape the labelling of a complaint and the subsequent recommended intervention measures. 187 Austrian human resource professionals, employee representatives and other practitioners were confronted with a fictional workplace bullying complaint including conflicting accounts of actors and diverse possible internal, relational and external causes. Since the prior low performance of a target might affect internal blame attributions, the previous performance ratings of the target were manipulated. A qualitative content analysis reveals that the cues and labels for the same complaint are very diverse. However, dominant single/multi-blaming patterns could be identified when the case was rejected or confirmed: When respondents reject the complaint, single internal causal attributions and blame against the target and/or trivialization of the complaint as “conflict” are predominant. When the complaint is fully supported, deontic statements and blame attributions against the perpetrator prevail; however, the full blame on the perpetrator is often discounted via multi-blame attributions against other actors like supervisors, colleagues and the target. Structural causes were rarely mentioned. Relational attributions are rare and often used to trivialize the complaint. Irrespective of the preceding attributional blame patterns, most third parties recommend “reconciliatory measures” between the actors (e.g. informal talks, mediation) rather than punitive measures (e.g. warnings) or structural changes. This study shows that organizational third parties often view bullying as dyadic and interpersonal victim/perpetrator conflict rather than an organization-caused phenomenon. The discussion of findings includes building effective trainings to avoid reflexive victim blaming and increasing the awareness for structural causes and solutions of workplace bullying complaints.