Andy P.D. Liefooghe and Ragnar Olafsson Roehampton Institute, London, UK
Keywords: Bullying, Organizational change, Policy, Work psychology
Type of Article: Survey, Theoretical with application in practice
When a new field is explored, a variety of approaches can be used to clarify, identify and explain the phenomenon at hand. Traditional psychological research attributes a quasi-physical quality to the bullying phenomenon, and attempts to capture it by rigorous measurement of a number of variables. We argue that, while this approach has considerable advantages, an investigation of the way "amateur scientists" explain "bullying" can aid a more detailed understanding. The use of the Critical Incident Technique in focus groups allowed participants to make their implicit thoughts and feelings about bullying explicit. Participants revealed a number of auxiliary or alternative frameworks to account for bullying-related phenomena. It is suggested that these frameworks need closer scrutiny in terms of social representations. Implications of this approach are discussed in terms of their potential effect on policy development and implementation, highlighting the role organisational culture plays in this field.
Content Indicators: Readability**, Practice Implications*, Originality**, Research Implications***
Bullying in the workplace is a phenomenon that has quite recently started to infiltrate the general consciousness in the UK, and is the focus of both individual and organisational concern. There is mounting evidence that being at the receiving end of bullying practices is detrimental to a person's wellbeing and effectiveness. Researchers and practitioners alike are faced with the fundamental question as to how this issue can be addressed. Perhaps not surprisingly, the initial step is to explore the extent to which bullying is a reality of people's working life. Surveys are traditionally perceived as the method to achieve this aim. A survey can indeed offer a snapshot of the current state of affairs, but needs to be supplemented by other approaches to aid the "mapping out" of the domain. This includes, among others, explaining why bullying occurs. Researchers (Leymann, 1990; Einarsen and Raknes, 1997; Zapf, 1997) have drawn on a range of perspectives to account for this, ranging from personality to organisational factors. "Explaining phenomena", however, is not the exclusive domain of researchers. While experts undertake the laborious task of creating an explanatory map of the domain, "ordinary" people have their own ways of making sense of the situation, and these do not necessarily involve the application of scientific rules.
The "expert" perspectiveThis section examines some methodologies used and the inherent assumptions held by psychologists (and perhaps shared by others) in this field. Limitations of surveys are well documented. Einarsen (1996) draws attention to the complex issues involved in measuring an inherently subjective topic with methods that are designed to offer results that are objective.
A number of instruments are used. One instrument, the Bergen Bullying Index (BBI), asks the participant a direct question about whether they are being bullied (Einarsen et al., 1994). Another asks participants whether they are being bullied using the definition provided (this is based on questionnaires previously used in school bullying (Olweus, 1978; Olweus and Smith, 1995)).
There are also measures based on a list of specific incidents (such as the Negative Acts Questionnaire - NAQ (Einarsen, 1996)), and behaviours (including the Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terror (LIPT) (Leymann, 1990; 1992; 1993)). Instruments such as the LIPT, for instance, use a behavioural index which is assumed to encompass the range of behaviours typically encountered by the recipient of bullying. The motivation for using these indices is to achieve a higher degree of objectivity. While measuring behaviours could indeed be more objective, it also assumes that a one-to-one relationship exists between behaviour and outcome - in this case, bullying. The participants indicate the behaviour they are exposed to, and the prevalence of bullying is operationalised as the occurrence of the behaviour once a week for at least half a year. Items for this questionnaire were generated from a large number of previous interviews conducted with people who had been bullied. Some items, however, still depend on the subjective appraisal of the respondent: it cannot be taken for granted that an answer to a statement such as "a superior limits your possibilities to express your opinion" will have the same meaning for each person responding. Rather, different participants are likely to operationalise the act of "limiting" differently. Similarly, when participants are required to base their responses on a definition of bullying that has been provided, they might respond from the definition they hold in their mind rather than from the one suggested.
Einarsen (1996) points out that the use of survey methods constitutes a static approach to the study of bullying at work. As his theoretical model illustrates, bullying also needs to be conceptualised as a process influenced by individual and organisational factors. Related fields offer similar suggestions. The stress literature, for example, abounds with evidence to suggest that stress is a dynamic process between the individual and their environment (Warr, 1987). Behaviours and incidents, then, need to be placed in the context in which they occur in order to be meaningful. Einarsen's model adds further moderating factors, such as the person's perception of the behaviour or incident and their reactions to it. This suggests that the person being bullied is not a passive receiver, but an active interpreter of ambiguous stimuli from their environment. Moreover, it suggests that the recipient of the behaviour needs to make a "choice" about the way he/she reacts to the stimuli. It is this complex domain of interpretations and internal negotiations that we propose to explore in more detail. The person can apply various conceptual frameworks to "make sense" of the situation. The set of frameworks available to the layperson is to a large extent determined by the social representations produced and transmitted in the society the person lives in. As the concept of workplace bullying is relatively new, there is unlikely to be a single shared representation available, but several that capture part of the concept. By the use of factor analysis, bullying has been shown to be a complex construct, consisting of several factors (Einarsen, 1996; Zapf et al., 1996). Yet factor analysis provides a limited insight into the complexities of the representations evoked by the lay person to account for bullying-related events.
The "amateur" perspectiveMoscovici and Hewstone (1983) argue that the lay person holds knowledge in the form of common-sense theories about all aspects of life and society, informed by scientific disciplines. This section of the paper explores how lay people explain events.
The transformation of scientific knowledge is seen to be a fundamental aspect of common-sense theories (Moscovici, 1981), and is truly social in its nature (Jaspars and Fraser, 1984). This underlines the relationship between science and common sense, viewing the lay person as an "amateur scientist" (Moscovici and Hewstone, 1983) who consumes, digests and transforms scientific knowledge, rather than merely trying (and failing) to follow scientific rules of inference. Moscovici and Hewstone (1983) consider there are two forms of common-sense knowledge: a residue of widely shared knowledge, which may be systematised by science, and a transformation of new scientific knowledge into everyday language. Following this argument through, explanations of "bullying" would be influenced by scientific knowledge about the nature of interpersonal relationships such as "how people function", which has infiltrated general consciousness.
Related fields of research are pertinent, for instance research on sexual harassment. Sexual harassment has received substantial attention from both researchers and the media alike. Empirical and anecdotal findings are made available to the lay person, who, in turn, transforms this knowledge into representations. Social representations are cognitive matrices co-ordinating ideas, words, images and perceptions that are interlinked (Moscovici and Hewstone, 1983). They are common sense "theories" about key aspects of society. The words people use, the attitudes they take, the kind of information they look for, the behaviour they enact, the relationships they engage in or the meaning they give to an object or a person, all can be considered as symptoms of a social representation. Hewstone (1989) points out that where social representations differ from other representational constructs are in their emphasis on the transformation of social knowledge. A representation is not merely a reproduction of something else, but a construction or transformation. It is this transformation from scientific, specialised knowledge that forms a fundamental aspect of common sense. People may seek justification of their interpretation by referring, for example, to a common understanding of what constitutes bullying. Moreover, once a representation is shared, it can have far-reaching consequences.
The idea of social representations is already implicit in the bullying literature, and illustrates the transformation aspect, although not referred to by name. The changing nature of representations is illustrated by Einarsen's (1998) description of the "devaluation" of the term "mobbing". He states that in Norway, bullying (mobbing) is a very popular term, and quotes Munthe (1989) who argues that bullying has almost lost a lot of its meaning. He continues:
During the 1980's it seemed to be used [mobbing] about almost everything and even in a very joking way, resulting in a situation were bullying was seen as something rather minor to be easily accepted and tolerated. If someone resented bullying and reported to be seriously hurt, they were seen as neurotic and hypersensitive persons, and were most likely to be blamed themselves for their own misfortune (p. 23).
As a result of the distribution of information about bullying at work, the meaning of the concept has shifted, illustrating how social representations change through additional scientific knowledge, media coverage and discussion.
The next section describes a study in which we investigate the complex set of representations that people use to make sense of bullying-like events - the cultural heritage that determines to a large extent the way in which these events are perceived. As a first step, we used the Critical Incident Technique to identify concepts and belief systems that are used to account for these events. A deeper analysis of these concepts and belief systems needs to be undertaken, but is beyond the scope of this paper. We believe that it is essential to examine this web of representations before proposing re-conceptualisations that may facilitate constructive solutions to the problem of bullying at work.
MethodologyCritical Incident Technique (CIT) is the oldest job analysis technique, devised by Flanagan (1954) to analyse failure in military flying training during the Second World War. Flanagan identified flying's critical requirements by collecting accounts of critical incidents that caused recruits to be rejected. On the basis of these accounts, a composite picture of the job's requirements can be collated. In recent years, many other applications of the technique have followed, including the bullying research by Leymann (1992). Its main benefit is that it focuses participants clearly on a particular scenario, including its antecedents, consequences, beliefs and attitudes.
As the aim of this research was to investigate bullying as a social and cultural phenomenon, it was assumed that "bullying" was experienced not only by a "bully" or "victim", but also by a whole group, social structure, or culture at large. Therefore, we selected an opportunity sample, rather than selecting participants on the basis of their bully-victim status. The participants were university staff and students who had experience of the workplace. They were invited to discuss their experience of interpersonal relationships at work in small groups or between three and six participants (N = 40). It was thought that focus groups would elicit representations more easily through in-depth discussion, and through interaction with others. The focus groups lasted for 90 minutes, with a debriefing period at the end of each group. Participants were informed that "bullying at work" had received some recent media coverage, and were asked to discuss their understanding of the phenomenon. Subsequently, they were requested to cite an incident from their experience, either current or retrospective, which they considered bullying. For each example, additional questions were asked to identify the salient elements of the incidents. For example, participants were asked what was it about the situation that made them refer to it as bullying. In addition, we followed Lewis' (1992) suggestion to add the element of asking the participant to describe individuals who were "most like . (bullies)" and "not at all like . (bullies)". Ethical concerns were taken into account by ensuring confidentiality and anonymity.
AnalysisThe following thematic discussion develops themes to explain how the perceptions of the "bullying" incident are dependent on available social representations, and how the interpretation of events has to be negotiated through taking various alternatives into account. Next, an illustration is offered of the link between the interpretations of the events and particular responses (or lack of them) to the event. Finally, the importance for the workforce of having a shared understanding of what constitutes "bullying" is highlighted.
An emerging representationIn this study, "bullying" as a concept or label is "artificially" induced or imposed on the participants. We ask them to describe incidents of "bullying"; it remains open to what extent "bullying" is the right term to describe those events. It is not certain that this term would have come naturally to the participants if they had been discussing those incidents among themselves. We have, then, to a certain extent imposed an interpretative framework on the participants' perceptions.
In some cases, participants questioned the applicability or appropriateness of the term: "well, I suppose you could call it that [bullying]". This limitation, if acknowledged, is however not problematic and discussions among participants about the applicability of the concept can elicit alternative representations of similar phenomena. Bullying was also described as "something that happens at school". These statements illustrate that people are using this concept tentatively to account for new experiences in their adult working life, where they feel the term "bullying" may not be directly applicable. These comments indicate that the participants are using the "anchoring" process (Moscovici, 1981), that is, they are explaining the new, unknown situation, their present bullying experience, in terms of an earlier "known" representation, in this case "bullying at school". The new phenomenon undergoes changes through this assimilation.
A number of possible representations and frameworks for the interpretation of incidents were identified in the discussions. These included: belittling, "trouble-maker", de-professionalisation, insecurity, "bad mood", "divide and rule", exclusions, embarrassment, injustice, hypocrisy, selfishness, control, power, the manager (good and bad), down-sizing (the workforce), pressure, stress, bully, victim and "weak" personality. Each representation has a corresponding set of shared beliefs, attitudes and behaviours which need to be identified in order to be able to understand what leads individuals to evoke the representation to account for particular situations and what purposes they serve.
The representations of "stress" for example would include beliefs about what causes stress, how people behave under stress and how stressed people should be handled. One participant suggested that a bullying manager is "under stress". This provides a framework that removes the responsibility of the bully's action to a certain extent from the manager and places it in the environment. This "choice" of framework alleviates some of the pain endured by the victim of his/her bullying behaviour ("he/she can't help it"). This framework for the person's interpretation of the events is made possible through the existence of a social representation of stress and how people behave under such circumstances.
Similarly, when one of the participants, a "victim" of bullying, attributes his/her hurt feelings to a "general tendency to feel victimised" (a lay person's "personality trait"), they distance themselves from their feelings. More importantly, it does not require any action on their part to confront the "bully". If the same "hurt feelings" were causally attributed to the "bully" a different set of behaviours would be called for. These examples show that various motivational factors can determine the choice of framework of explanation, and each choice has certain attitudinal (and possibly behavioural) consequences, prescribed by the evoked representational system.
The process of negotiationThe activation of a social representation is not something that just "occurs" or is passively experienced. Rather, an array of possible representations can be activated, and the individual becomes an active agent in making the choice of which representation to apply, guided by contextual information available.
The following examples illustrate the interplay between "objective facts" and the representations of them. The interpretative framework is open to active negotiation and can often be ambiguous. In this extract, it is the "shouting at" that requires interpretation:
The person who shouts at me doesn't like me, the person who shouts at me thinks I'm incompetent, the person who shouts at me is frustrated by, I don't know, something or other.
From the three options for interpretation that present themselves to the person on the receiving end of the shouting, it is obvious that the classification/representation of the act has widely differing consequences in terms of emotions and actions that are likely to follow. In the passage below, which also involves "shouting at", the participant shifts between two representational frameworks:
It leaves the person being shouted at feeling extremely undervalued. In my case I felt undervalued and apologetic until I thought "No, this isn't life, I'm not like that, I can do this job, I shouldn't be spoken to like that, this isn't the way things should be done - so I took steps to turn it around and once the person concerned realised I wasn't going to stand there and take it, their attitude changed quite a lot and it's fine now, so I think bullies are very insecure.
Initially, the behaviour that needed interpretation ("shouted at") was put in a framework that entailed feeling "undervalued" and "apologetic". However, by referring to shared representations of normal behavioural standards ("this isn't the way things should be done") the individual locates the behaviour ("shouting") in a different framework which was accompanied by a change of strategy ("I took steps to turn it around").
In the extract below, the interviewee is trying to assess whether they are being bullied or not:
Suddenly I found myself in a position where somebody wasn't speaking to me. I wasn't quite sure whether it was deliberate.
The fact that the action has to be "deliberate" indicates that the participant is working with a representation of bullying where the harm done has to be intentional. The uncertainty about whether the harm was intentional prompted the participant to seek out more information-
I tried to observe it and see what was happening [to see] whether that person was like that with other people too . and [I] was the only one: they spoke to everyone but not to me.
Being "singled out" also seems to be part of this participant's representation of bullying. Both the above quotes illustrate how the representations guide the participant's information seeking. Another quote illustrates how an "amateur personality theory" is applied, with the effect of making the bullying experience slightly more tolerable. The participant comes to the conclusion that the "bully" is in a "bad mood". For example:
You say "good morning" [without getting a response] and then you see a few people and then you say "is it specific or general today?" Is everyone getting blanked or is it me particularly? And then people will say, "oh she's in a bad mood today" . [the behaviour] is not okay, but you realise that it is not necessarily you [that the behaviour is directed against]. You don't have to be quite as paranoid about it.
ResponsesThe link between particular lay classifications and suggested behaviours is illustrated in the following passage:
There is the "up-front" and "out in your face" bully who is shouting and belittling you [.]. When someone is shouting at you [.] you have more of a springboard to work from.
A number of representational frameworks, however, seem to hamper decisive action. Feelings can be causally linked by the participant to the bully or explained internally, with a "personality trait":
I think it is more about the kind of person I am . easily bullied . [It is] a familiar response to feel like a victim.
Here, the participant is attributing the cause of the feeling to herself rather than to the other person. She perceives herself as a "victim type". The implications of this attribution are a failure to take any confrontational action.
Below, the participant is negotiating whether to take action against the bully. There is a fine line between "standing up for oneself" and "telling tales".
Maybe it is the fear that if [the confrontation] doesn't work, in the workplace you might have to take it further, and then it becomes "telling tales".
Also:
Am I making a fuss about what someone might think is very little?
The fear of being labelled a "trouble-maker" discourages participants from taking action against the bully:
You are on the line . and then you're given the role of being the trouble-maker if you're not careful [.] but you've got to feel strong to do it.
Or:
What I found [was] that those who are the most vocal and get angry about things [.] get labelled as trouble-makers.
Shared meaningIf the participant could count on a shared set of representations on which to found the interpretations of the events, then they would presumably find it easier to take action.
The importance of having a shared representation of "bullying" is illustrated in the following quotations:
You are frightened of making a fuss over something that other people might not view as bullying, and you don't want to bring up situations.
Or:
This person behaved in a particular way which I personally perceived as bullying and I think I wasn't alone in that view.
ImplicationsFrom an academic point of view, it is interesting to study how interpersonal conflict of various kinds is represented at present. "Workplace bullying" is a relatively new framework to account for such events (Lee, 1998). This study has illustrated some of the frameworks at work, when people try to account for bullying-type behaviour. It can be expected that "workplace bullying" as a concept will achieve greater currency with the public, as research and media coverage intensifies. We suspect that at present, events of the "bullying kind" are conceptualised by the general public in ways which are less conducive to constructive action and often lead to (self) destructive scenarios for the workers and/or the employers.
To facilitate the development of more constructive conceptualisations of interpersonal conflict of this sort, companies would benefit from research within their own parameters on the kinds of interpersonal conflicts that occur and the way they are conceptualised and dealt with by the workforce. Concerns to be addressed could include whether or not employees blame it on "company culture" (Archer, 1998) with decreasing loyalties or commitment or whether or not most employees see it as an inevitable part of work-life. Such research would give an overview of the kinds of problems occurring, perceptions of them and the perceived consequences or solutions to them. It is important for organisations to cultivate a social representation, shared by the whole organisation, which clearly delineates acceptable and unacceptable behaviour at work. In other words, rather than "allowing" the existing implicit representations to guide employees' actions, the organisation can take an active role in introducing a new representation in the form of a shared policy or code of conduct.
Initially, these research questions are best addressed in an open-ended way, for example, by introducing in focus groups the topic of "interpersonal conflict" or "interpersonal relationships" as a general topic for discussion, and allow events and conceptualisations to emerge. One way to start increasing people's awareness is through discussion in groups about their understanding of what constitutes bullying. This will facilitate the development of a shared frame of reference, which will help to reduce ambiguity about the interpretation of the bullying behaviour, and thus facilitate preventative and remedial action. This approach would be sensitive to cultural idiosyncrasies of particular organisations, which may be expressed in local or class dependent slang. We cannot assume that such conceptualisations would be the same in other organisations. Our research on school bullying has shown that the words used to describe "bullying" events may be colloquial and that the specific meaning of these conceptualisations needs to be investigated (Smith et al., in press). Such an exercise would have various benefits for companies: It would increase awareness of bullying issues among staff, increase management's insight into specific problems in their organisation, and generate information about the repertoire of conceptualisations available to the workforce to account for such events.
In a second step, discussions on new solutions can be facilitated with input from experts. These external consultants would inform the re-conceptualisation of the events. Ultimately, this could form the basis of a company policy on workplace bullying. Rather than imposing it from above it is generated by the workforce at all levels and has built in it the reality specific to the company. This increases the policy's validity and the likelihood of its implementation. This is consistent with Glover et al.'s (1998) experience of implementing policy in schools.
An example of a representation that would merit further study is the representation of a "trouble maker". It emerged from the data that people were sometimes reluctant to make complaints about bullying-type behaviour for fear of being labelled "a trouble-maker". Research questions would be concerned with finding out the contents of the representation of a "trouble-maker". Questions could relate to the nature of the stigma/attitudes attached to people labelled in such a way, the perceived consequences to the person thus labelled, and the criteria that distinguish the trouble-maker from a person who makes a "legitimate" complaint and is valued for it. Such an analysis might reveal deficiencies within the company with the way internal criticisms are dealt with - these deficiencies can then be addressed. We aim to look at the multitude of alternative and associated representations which are used to account for bullying-type events and examine how these can be reconstructed in ways that are more conducive to positive action.
ConclusionIn this paper we have emphasised an approach which does not see bullying as an "objective reality", but rather as a set of events which can be conceptualised in many ways - "bullying" being one of them. We have suggested that "workplace bullying" is an emerging and rapidly developing representation of such events. By studying the alternative repertoire of representations available at present in companies, its development can be monitored and ultimately influenced, leading to more constructive solutions to bullying-type incidents.
Exploring people's representations of a phenomenon allows us to have a more detailed glimpse into the different individual and organisational factors that are believed to influence the bullying process. What we present here forms a limited demonstration of how this can supplement and inform the research strategies currently employed to investigate bullying at work. The study of the representations of bullying using a multi-method approach would enable the mapping of people's repertoire of representations that serve to interpret the objective realities. It provides a framework that incorporates the cultural, organisational and individual levels for the study of bullying. Equally, this framework establishes the links between beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.
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Copyright © 1999 MCB. All rights reserved International Journal of Manpower, Vol 20 Issue 1/2 Date 1999 ISSN 0143-7720
  
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