The Changing Landscape of Organizations

• Defined as: "Characteristically rude and discourteous behavior"
  • Examples: Being interrupted when speaking; not being thanked; intentionally not holding open a door for someone, etc.
  • Intentional or unintentional
• Causes: Power dynamics; procedural unfairness; organizational structure
• Effects: Decreased job satisfaction, turnover, violence

Review of Literature: Workplace Incivility

• Workplace violence, incivility, and bullying all have their origins in the study of organizational citizenship behavior, more specifically,
• workplace deviance Workplace Deviance is "voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational norms and in so doing threatens the well-being of an organization, its members, or both".
• Four quadrants of workplace deviance:

1. Production Deviance (Behaviors that directly interfere with work)
2. Property Deviance (The destruction of property)
3. Political Deviance**(Mild interpersonal behavior)
4. Personal Aggression (Harmful interpersonal behavior)

• Incivility is a negative issue and has varying degrees of intensity
  • Mild examples:
  • Not making another pot of coffee after last cup has been poured
  • not opening doors for people
  • not thanking someone
  • Extreme examples:
  • Rude comments
  • Verbal abuse
  • Harassment
• Usually starts with some sort of change (i.e. newemployee, change in ownership, new work groups)
• Causes:
  • Crowded working conditions
  • Excess stress
  • Power dynamics
• Occurrence:
  • 92% of current employees reported at least one incident of incivility in the past three years (American Management Association)
  • 80% of victims are women
    
  • Of those 80%, 50% are women over the age of 45 Incivility perpetrators are usually (77%) women between the ages of 20 and 45
    
    

Workplace bullying

• Sometimes referred to as "Escalated Incivility" or "Generalized Harassment".
• Workplace bullying refers to highly negative verbal and nonverbal communicative behaviors that are characterized by:
  
  • Repetition/frequency /duration(persistent)
  • Intentional
  • Escalated
  • Power
  • Adverse Effects
    
    

The Target's perspective – Research Findings

• Both men & women engage in bullying (women tend to bully more than men)
• Men are bullied by men/women are bullied by women
• Bullies are typically identified as managers or those with a higher org rank than the target
• Targets self-report they are college-educated (84%) & veteran's of the org (7 years)

Lack of research

• There is a large gap in research on workplace bullying:
  • The HR (ombudsman) perspective
  • The bully's perspective
  • Varying definitions
  • Overlap in the construct
    
    

Why does bullying happen in organizations?

• Salin's comprehensive review of literature identified three necessary organizational antecedents to bullying in the workplace:

Repercussions of workplace bullying

Individual:

• Psychological trauma
• Severe stress
• Physical health issues
• Negative self-identity which requires remediation

Organizational:

• Toxic organizational culture(recruiting issues, etc.)
• Absenteeism,
• High turnover
• Lower productivity
• Costly employee health effects
• Legal countermeasures by employees

WKB & the hr professional

• Defined WKB similarly to targets and academics but with important differences
• Complicated to identify and pin down bullying due to the myriad of behaviors associated with it, its subtle nature, and its varying degrees.
• Varying degrees: Based on repetition and the actual behaviors associated with the bullying.
  
• These HR professionals made sense of how and why bullying happens in organizations in a variety of ways.
• Roles:
  • The HR profs. felt they played a progressive, changing role in bullying situations, emotional laborer, powerful vs. powerless.
  • The HR profs. felt UM saw their role in bullying situations as: 1) a partner/resource, 2) "take care of it", 3) objective, third party, 4) and as a nag.
  • The HR profs. felt targets saw their role in bullying situations as: 1) "fix it" and 2) trusted listener.
• Do U.S. orgs use policies to address bullying?
  • 1 had an anti-bullying policy
  • 16 had policies they felt covered bullying (without labeling it as such)
  • 17 did not have a policy that covered bullying or did not know if they had a policy.
• What did these policies seem to be communicating?
• What did the HR professionals feel the policies communicated?