Abstract :
[de] Just like many school aggression researchers (see the review of studies in Olivier et al., 2021), many scholars investigating workplace bullying assume the existence of types of involved employees. Commonly, scholars distinguish four types of employees: Uninvolved employees, victims, perpetrator, and provocative victims (also called ‘bully-victims’; e.g., Zapf & Einarsen, 2020). So far, empirical evidence supporting such a typology is lacking so far. Studies on workplace bullying mostly focused solely on the victim perspective (Einarsen et al., 2020; see also the review of studies in Gupta
et al., 2020) and only a handful of studies investigate the perpetrator perspective (see the enumerated studies in Nielsen & Einarsen, 2018). Only a few studies include both perspectives (e.g., Fernández-del-Río et al., 2021; Sischka et al., 2021). However, these studies applied a variable-centered approach and treated workplace bullying exposure and perpetration as separate variables. Thus, they leave us somewhat in the dark with respect to the existence of the aforementioned typology. The current study employs a person-centered approach (i.e., latent class modelling) to identify groups of employees that show different patterns of workplace bullying involvement.
Moreover, the current study aims to identify predictors of group membership.
We investigate the individual disposition hypothesis (Nielsen & Einarsen, 2018), assuming that individual characteristics such as personality traits may be related to being involved in bullying and could therefore be typifying features of workplace bullying groups. Moreover, according to some researchers in workplace bullying, individual characteristics such as certain personality traits (big five dimensions, trait aggression, dominance) are particularly appropriate to identify and distinguish
workplace bullying subgroups (Matthiesen & Einarsen, 2007; see also Nielsen et al., 2017). On the other hand, power and social status represent enabling structures (Salin, 2003) of workplace bullying, and power imbalance is often seen as a defining feature of workplace bullying (Einarsen et al., 2020). Thus, we investigate whether different workplace bullying groups differ with regard to perceived power and social status.
To test our hypotheses, respondents were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk; Buhrmester et al., 2011; Crump et al., 2013) using CloudResearch (Litman & Robinson, 2020) to participate in an online survey. The final sample contained 1,492 respondents (53.8% females, n = 802), with ages ranging from 19 to 77 (M = 40.2, SD = 10.8). Most respondents worked full time (91.2%, n = 1,360). The survey contained the Short-Negative Acts Questionnaire (S-NAQ; Notelaers et al., 2019) that was applied from the victim as well as from the perpetrator perspective. Furthermore, we assessed the big five with the Mini-IPIP (Donnellan et al., 2006), trait aggression with the brief aggression questionnaire (Webster et al., 2014), and dominance with the domineering subscale of the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (Soldz et al., 1995). Moreover, power and social status were assessed with a newly developed bipartite measure of social hierarchy (Yu et al, 2019). A latent class modelling approach was employed. Statistical fit indices, substantive interpretability and utility, as well as classification diagnostics were jointly considered to determine the number of workplace bullying classes. Latent class structure analysis revealed that the classes were meaningfully linked with the big five dimensions, trait aggression, dominance, power and social status. The cross-sectional and self-reported nature of the study. Scholars and policy makers need to be aware of different patterns of being involved in workplace bullying in order to create effective interventions. Personality factors as well as power and social status are important correlates of workplace bullying involvement.
