Experiences of workplace bullying among non-traditional students: Cause for concern for both business and education?

Abstract

Workplace bullying (WPB) has been identified as an insidious aspect of the contemporary work environment (Einarsen, Höel, Zapf, & Cooper, 2003). The present study had three related aims (i) to determine current and prior personal experience of WPB among a sample of 295 adults returning to tertiary education, (ii) to further explore the ‘work environment hypothesis’ (Einarsen, Raknes, & Matthiesen, 1994; Mc Guckin, Lewis, & Shevlin, under review) as an antecedent in the WPB process by examining the relationship between the ‘psychosocial workplace’ and exposure to WPB (Varhama & Björkqvist, 2004a, b; Varhama et al., 2010), and (iii) to explore the relationship between exposure to WPB and salient work and life attitude variables (Mc Guckin et al., under review). Overall, 32.4% (n = 93) of the respondents had been bullied in the previous 6 months, 42.1% (n = 120) had witnessed colleagues being bullied during this period, and 56.8% (n = 162) had been bullied in their previous career. The collective influence of the hypothesised antecedent variables (i.e., ‘Challenge’, ‘Social Climate’, ‘Leadership’, ‘Work Control’, ‘Work Load’, ‘Role Conflict’, and ‘Role Ambiguity’) explained a significant proportion of the variance in relation to self-reported personal experience of workplace bullying. Exposure to workplace bullying was significantly related to impaired ‘work and life attitudes’.