The “Bullied” Manager: An Empirical Study of Individual, Organizational and Contextual Factors

Abstract

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study the determinants of workplace bullying in a group of employees with a privileged position within the company: managers. First of all, we define the phenomenon. After, we make a review of literature with the object to set related variables in a global model of workplace bullying. A sample population of 608 managers was obtained from the microdata file of the last European Working Conditions Survey (European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions). The methodology used to achieve our research objectives is based on the binary logistic regression model. With this statistical technique we determine the probability of the occurrence of an event-workplace bullying in this case-compared to the probability of the occurrence of the opposite event. The global model is integrated by individual, organizational and contextual factors and predicts the likelihood of workplace bullying in 68% (61.6% between bullied managers and 75.9% between non bullied managers). The resulting model for managers is similar to models of workplace bullying for employees in general. Key words: Workplace bullying; Power; Harassment; Mobbing; Managers