Bullying and harassment at work and their relationships to work environment quality: An exploratory study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to explore relationships between organizational and social work conditions and the occurrence of bullying and harassment at work. Bullying and harassment are situations where a worker or supervisor is systematically mistreated and victimized by fellow workers or supervisors through repeated negative acts like insulting remarks and ridicule, verbal abuse, offensive teasing, isolation, and social exclusion, or the constant degrading of one's work and efforts. A postal questionnaire was distributed to 4200 members of six different labour unions, together with 500 representatives from the Norwegian Employers' Federation (NHO). Two thousand two hundred and fifteen responded, yielding a response rate of 47%. The results show that the occurrence of bullying and harassment is significantly correlated with all the seven measures of work environment used in the study. Low satisfaction with leadership, work control, social climate, and particularly the experience of role conflict, correlate most strongly with bullying. The results also show that different work conditions are related to bullying in different organizational settings. Only role conflict shows a partial correlation with bullying in all subsamples. Work conditions account for 10% of the variance in bullying, ranging from 7% to 24% in the different sub-samples. The results show that both the victims of bullying and the observers of bullying report a low-quality work environment.