Psychological contact violation or basic need frustration? Psychological mechanisms behind the effects of workplace bullying.

Workplace bullying is a serious phenomenon that has serious detrimental effects on victim’s health, attitudes, and work-related behavior. However, research that examines the mechanisms behind these relations is still sparse. Two theories that may explain the links between workplace bullying and various negative outcomes are social exchange theory and self-determination theory.
Drawing on these theories, we hypothesized that the relationship between workplace bullying and various outcomes is mediated by perceptions of psychological contract violation and the frustration of basic psychological needs (i.e. autonomy, competence, relatedness). Therefore, the aim of our study was to test these mediators separately and simultaneously to see whether they have an incremental mediation effect between workplace bullying and well-being, work satisfaction, engagement, performance, burnout, workplace deviance and turnover intentions.
An online survey design was employed and data were collected among U.S. employees. The final sample consists of 1,408 respondents (56.6% females, n=798, age: M=37.3, SD =10.4).
Single mediation analysis within a structural equation modeling framework revealed that psychological contract violation acted as a mediator for all outcome variables. Furthermore, basic need frustrations were also meaningfully mediators between workplace bullying and all outcomes, but different need frustration were differently linked with them. The multiple mediation analyses mainly supported the hypothesized importance of the mediators for the different outcomes.
The study findings advance the field through identifying the most important mediators between workplace bullying and several outcome variables guiding possible interventions.