The Workplace Bullying from the Perspective of Estonian and Russian-Speakers in Post-Soviet Country

Abstract

Workplace bullying is a negative deviant behaviour, which has gained little attention in the former Soviet countries. Soviet Union’s policy created two distinct groups – Estonian- and Russian-speaking populations in Estonia. This study aims to investigate the prevalence of workplace bullying in Estonian organisations from the perspective of cultural background, which derives from belonging to the Estonian- or Russian-speaking population. The empirical research is based on a sample of 1707 respondents and two instruments were implemented: first, evaluating the perception of workplace bullying with the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised by Einarsen & Raknes (2009); and second, examining the values of the national cultures in question based on G. Hofstede’s model (1980). The results demonstrated that cultural values and the degree of reported workplace bullying manifest differently in the Estonian- and Russian-speaking working environments. Power distance as a cultural value was shown to increase the probability to report workplace bullying. Employees from organisations having more than 20 per cent of speakers of Russian report a significantly higher degree of all kinds of workplace bullying when compared with those that work in a primarily Estonian-speaking company.