Continuities into the workplace: what can we learn from research into workplace bullying

Continuities into the workplace: what can we learn from research into workplace bullyin

Factors impacting on the design, development and use of an effective pre-employment integrity test

The aim of this thesis was to examine various factors that impact on the design, development and use of effective paper and pencil pre-employment integrity tests and to take these factors into account in the development of a personality-based test. Findings indicated that current definitions of the concept purported to be examined by integrity tests were inadequate. In particular, it was argued that honesty is not the concept under investigation, rather the focus should be on a concept of Employee Compliance. Compliance takes into account the requirement that dishonest behaviours go against formal organisational rules as well as the strong link between not acting in a counterproductive manner and trait conscientiousness.A survey of 279 UK-based personnel managers indicated that base-rates of dishonest behaviour in the UK ranged from around 60% to 80% if the behaviour is considered infrequent and/or not serious. For the more serious behaviours (such as alcohol abuse and sabotage) rates were between 23% to 44%. Honesty/integrity was viewed by personnel managers as the most important attribute within employees and this was consistent across industry sector. For example, honesty/integrity was considered more important than interest in the work, general ability, general personality and work experience. A large proportion of participants reported using references (78%) and/or interviews (66%) to assess for honesty and integrity, with few using honesty and integrity tests (2.5%).Further, integrity tests in general were shown to compare favourably against 6 psychometric quality issues and in most cases better than other methods that are used to examine honesty/integrity. In particular, integrity tests were shown to be valid, reliable, fair and practical methods of assessment. The scope of integrity tests depends upon the type of tests used. They can measure both narrow (theft) and broad criteria (employee deviance). Some issues were raised in respect to training, labelling and false positiveissues within such tests.Personality was shown to play a key role in whether an individual is likely to act in a dishonest manner. Results from two studies, using a Five-Factor Model framework showed that intended and reported dishonest behaviour related negatively to conscientiousness, stability and social desirability and positively to extraversion. An individual likely to engage in dishonest workplace behaviour will tend to have casual attitude to rules, view the world as hostile and become alienated, seek excitement and be impulsive, and be socially insensitive. The Five-Factor framework was then utilised in the development of a personality-based test that examined the construct of Employee Compliance. This new Compliance scale was shown to be valid, reliable, fair, acceptable and practical in relation to integrity tests in general and other methods of assessing honesty/integrity. The issue of whether a 'honest' individual is a theoretical ideal rather than a practical requirement was discussed and whether such individuals would be appropriate for all types of jobs.A laboratory study indicated that cheating behaviour was not only a function of personality (Compliance) but also the interaction between Compliance and group norms supporting cheating. A significant interaction emerged between Compliance and group norms on cheating behaviour. Specifically, the highest amount of cheating occurred for those individuals low in Compliance (hence likely to cheat) in the situation where group norms promoted cheating. Such findings have implications for integrity testing as not only does the dispositional aspect of dishonest behaviour need to be examined, organisations also need to consider the impact that the work environment may have of promoting or reducing dishonest behaviour

Job stressors and voluntary work behaviours: mediating effect of emotion and moderating roles of personality and emotional intelligence

Framed within an emotion-centred model, the current study investigated the mediating role of negative and positive emotion between job stressors and counterproductive work behaviours (CWB) and organisational citizenship behaviours, and the moderating effects of personality and ability-based emotional intelligence (EI) on the relationships between job stressors and emotions. Results from a sample of 202 Caribbean employees across eight public and private sector organisations showed that both positive and negative emotion mediated the relation between job stressors and citizenship behaviours, whereas only negative emotion was found to mediate the relation between job stressors and CWB. Some support was found for the moderating effects of personality and EI. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Preventing bullying in school and work contexts

Preventing bullying in school and work context

Cyberbullying within working contexts

The current chapter debates the limited existing research evidence on cyberbullying within working contexts. We examine critically conceptualising cyberbullying as a new type of negative work behaviour or simply an extension of traditional bullying. The focus then moves to presenting the evidence on prevalence rates, impact and antecedents of workplace cyberbullying. This culminates in a discussion of theoretical ideas that may aid our understanding of cyberbullying at work from the computer-mediated communication and psychology literatures. The chapter concludes by providing the reader with five action points for enhancing future research in this topic area

Understanding individual experiences of cyberbullying encountered through work

Little research has explored individual experiences of cyberbullying in working contexts. To start bridging the gap in our current understanding, we used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore individuals’ shared experiences of cyberbullying encountered through work. In-depth interviews, conducted with five cyberbullied workers from the pharmaceutical, charity and university sectors, resulted in five superordinate themes: attributions of causality; crossing of boundaries; influence of communication media richness on relationship development; influence of communication explicitness and openness; and strategies for coping. Overall, some similarities emerged between cyberbullying experiences and traditional bullying research, yet the complexities associated with managing relationships, both virtually and physically, were central to individuals’ subjective experiences. Practical implications in developing effective leadership and business policies to support virtual groups and manage behaviours are discussed

Support for a general factor of well-being

Well-being is typically defined as positive feeling (e.g. happiness), positive functioning (e.g. competence, meaning) or a combination of the two. Recent evidence indicates that well-being indicators belonging to different categories can be explained by single “general” factor of well-being (e.g. Jovanovic, 2015). We further test this hypothesis using a recent well-being scale, which includes indicators of positive feeling and positive functioning (Huppert & So, 2013). While the authors of the scale originally identified a two-factor structure, in view of recent evidence, we hypothesize that the two-factor solution may be due to a method effect of different items being measured with different rating scales. In study 1, we use data from the European Social Survey round 3 (n = 41,461) and find that two factors have poor discriminant validity and, after using a bifactor model to account for different rating scales, only the general factor is reliable. In study 2, we eliminate method effects by using the same rating scale across items, recruit a new sample (n = 507), and find that a one-factor model fits the data well. The results support the hypothesis that well-being indicators, typically categorized as “positive feeling” and “positive functioning,” reflect a single general factor

Cyberbullying at work: Understanding the influence of technology

We exist at a time when technology has revolutionised the way people work. It is now just as easy to communicate electronically with colleagues thousands of miles away as it is with a coworker in the same building. While there are many advantages of information and communication technologies (ICTs), workplace cyberbullying channeled through ICTs illustrates the potential drawbacks of such technologies. The current chapter examines the limited, yet developing research on workplace cyberbullying. First, we discuss the criteria used to define workplace cyberbullying and the behaviours that encompass it. Second, we present current empirical findings, including research on the actors involved in the process and the antecedents, prevalence and impact of workplace cyberbullying. Finally, we discuss theoretical perspectives on why workplace cyberbullying occurs, highlight the emerging focus on the work context and present some suggestions for future research in this area

Development of the short version of the Scales of General Well-Being: the 14-item SGWB

The Scales of General Well-Being (SGWB, Longo, Coyne, & Joseph, 2017) is a 65-item tool assessing fourteen different constructs. The aim of this study was to develop a short 14-item version. One item was chosen from each of the fourteen scales following inspection of previously-published factor loadings and content validity ratings. In total, 446 responses from U.S residents were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results supported a factor structure consistent with the long form, as well as good internal consistency. Additionally, general well-being scores of short- and long-form correlated at 0.96 and each item in the short-form was strongly related to its respective long-form scale. The 14-item SGWB offers a brief assessment of well-being based on a novel and comprehensive operational definition, and promises to be of practical use to researchers and clinicians

The scales of general well-being (SGWB)

This paper presents the development and validation of a new well-being questionnaire: the Scales of General Well-Being (SGWB). A review of current measures identified fourteen common constructs as lower-order indicators of well-being: happiness, vitality, calmness, optimism, involvement, self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-worth, competence, development, purpose, significance, self-congruence and connection. Three studies were then conducted. In study 1, the item pool was developed and the adequacy of its content to assess each of the fourteen constructs was evaluated by consulting a panel of six subject expert academics. In study 2, the dimensionality was assessed in an adult North American sample (N = 560). The results supported the hierarchical factor structure. In study 3, further evidence confirmed the factor structure, and provided support for the measure’s internal and test-retest reliability, measurement invariance across gender, age and a longitudinal period of 5 weeks, and criterion validity in an adult North American sample (N = 1,101). The SGWB promises to be a useful research tool that provides both a global measure of well-being as well as a collection of fourteen individual health-related scales