Examining the Repercussions of workplace bullying and psychological Distress: Silence of the Victims and Moderating role of Psychological Hardliness

Abstract

Workplace bullying is an important area of study which has grasped the researchers’ awareness in business studies around the world. The occurrence of bullying is not very new and has been discussed for the last three decades but it still requires more clarity in foreseeing employee-level outcomes and theoretical support from different cultures and different geographical regions. The current study emphasizes this gap by presenting a theoretical model and investigating whether workplace bullying positively predicts employee-level outcomes of silent behavior, turnover intentions, and task performance. This study examines the mediation effect of psychological distress between the relationship of WPB and employee level outcomes as mentioned above (i.e. silent behavior, turnover intentions, and task performance). Further, the impact of positive psychology constructs, i.e. psychological hardiness was also checked as a possible moderator of relationships between psychological distress and its possible outcomes. Bullying is a type of undesirable behaviors which are aggressive and hostile and are repeated several times among persons with power difference at the workplace. The repetition factor in bullying is a cause of dishonor to the employees hence becomes a basis of high levels of stress for a longer period. It was expected that bullying in countries with more power differences might have more distressing effects so the current study focused on examining the phenomenon of bullying in a similar context. Social cognitive theory and conservation of resource theory provided the theoretical foundation for the projected relationships as mentioned above. Primary data was collected from faculty members of higher education institutions of Pakistan. A multi-stage sampling method was used to choose the samples and structural equation modeling was applied to assess the hypothesized relationships. Study findings determined that SEM provided an adequate fit to the data and that most of the theorized relationships were accepted. It was revealed that WPB positively influenced employees’ silent behavior and turnover intention while task performance was determined negatively. However, contrary to the predicted relationship it turned out from the consequences that psychological distress does not mediate the relationships between WPB and employees’ task performance. Moreover, it was also discovered that adversely reported psychological hardiness negatively moderated the impact of psychological distress on employees’ level outcomes of silent behavior and turnover intention. A notable theoretical x implication of the study is the extension of the positive psychology literature: positive psychology variable of psychological hardiness is suggested as significant employee strength and findings proved that employees if not well-equipped with hardiness will be exposed more to the adversarial outcomes of distress within bullying prone environment. The theoretical contribution of this research will help in policymaking by the practitioners for the employees to avoid involvement in hostile behaviors at the workplace and design training and interventions focused on psychological hardiness in aspects such as job analysis, recruitment and selection, and work design. In the future, longitudinal or daily diary studies can better help the researchers to gain insight into the dynamic nature of workplace bullying. The present study is limited to the higher education sector recommending future research to be focused on other sectors as well to completely comprehend the phenomenon of workplace bullying.