Exposure to workplace bullying has been argued to be a severe social stressor and a more crippling and devastating problem for affected individuals than the effects of all other work-related stressors put together. However, few studies have explicitly investigated this assumption. In a representative sample of the Norwegian working population, the present study investigated the relative contribution of workplace bullying as a predictor of individual and organizational related outcomes after controlling for the well-documented job stressors of job demands, decision authority, role ambiguity and role conflict. Bullying was found to be a significant predictor of all the outcomes included, showing a substantial relative contribution in relation to anxiety and depression, while for job satisfaction, turnover intention and absenteeism, more modest relative contributions were identified. Workplace bullying is indeed a potent social stressor with consequences similar to, or even more severe than, the effects of other stressors frequently encountered within organizations. Thus, the finding that bullying has a considerable effect on exposed individuals also when controlling for the effects of other job stressors demonstrates bullying as a serious problem at workplaces that needs to be actively prevented and managed in its own right.
Language: en
LA - en SN - 0036-5564 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2010.00813.x ID - ref1 ER -