Dieter Zapf Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Germany
Keywords: Bullying, Organizational behaviour, Organizational conflict
Type of Article: Survey, Theoretical with application in practice
This article investigates the causes of mobbing (bullying) at work. Mobbing is defined as a severe form of social stressors at work. Unlike "normal" social stressors, mobbing is a long lasting, escalated conflict with frequent harassing actions systematically aimed at a target person. It is argued that the organisation, the social system, a certain perpetrator and the victim have to be considered as potential causes of mobbing. Results of two samples of mobbing victims and a control group support this view. It is concluded that one-sided explanations on the causes of mobbing are likely to be inappropriate and that many cases are characterised by multi-causality - a common finding in conflict research.
Content Indicators: Readability***, Practice Implications**, Originality**, Research Implications***
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank members of the Society against Psychosocial Stress and Mobbing for their help in distributing questionnaires. The Konstanz sample was supported by a fund of the University of Konstanz. The collection of the DAG-sample was organised and funded by the Deutsche Angestellten Gewerkschaft Bezirk Württemberg. Thanks are also due to Ute Cornelius, Harald Krauss and Dieter Groeblinghoff.
Introduction
Based on research in Sweden, Heinz Leymann (1993a; 1993b; 1996) introduced the concept of mobbing (bullying) as a severe form of harassment in organisations. Mobbing is defined as psychological aggression that often involves a group of "mobbers" rather than a single person. Theoretically, mobbing is an extreme type of social stressor at work. Unlike "normal" social stressors, however, mobbing is a long-lasting, escalated conflict with frequent harassing actions systematically aimed at a target person (Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996; Leymann, 1996; Zapf, 1999; Zapf et al., 1996). Bullying, on the other hand, connotes physical aggression by a single person, mostly by a supervisor. Empirical studies have shown that this is clearly not the case (Zapf, 1999). In Germany, the term "mobbing" is preferred, but in this article the terms mobbing and bullying are used interchangeably.
The central question posed in this paper is what are the causes of mobbing? There have been heated discussions around this point. One view represented by a section of the media and some employers, holds that mobbing victims are responsible for being mobbed. Some physicians and clinical psychologists who treat mobbing victims support the view. As reported by a number of case studies, these physicians and psychologists cannot believe that the severe symptoms observed in the victims are substantially a result of the victims' work situation. Rather, they develop diagnoses such as "querulous behavior" or "general anxiety disorder" and suggest that these disorders existed before the mobbing process began and that the disorders are what caused the mobbing process to develop.
Leymann (1996), as well as mobbing victims and their organisational networks present a contrary view. This view claims that organisational reasons, predominantly problems in the organisation of work and leadership problems, are the cause of mobbing.
Yet another view can be found in the popular book by Adams (Adams with Crawford, 1992) where certain individuals, the bullies, are made responsible for workplace harassment. Finally, Schuster (1996), based on findings in developmental and social psychology, points to the social system and processes of social exclusion as a potential cause of mobbing.
There is insufficient research to date, to explain the causes of mobbing. Methodological problems hamper the empirical investigation of the phenomenon. As a result, there is an abundance of descriptive case reports that are usually based on interviews with victims. The perspectives of perpetrators and potential bystanders are not sought. In this paper, I will argue that one-sided explanations should be avoided. Data will be presented to support the view that multiple causes of mobbing have to be taken into consideration, and that mobbing can be caused by more than one factor simultaneously. Figure 1. Causes and consequences of mobbing presents a model of the causes and consequences of mobbing. The four potential causes of mobbing shown at the left-hand side of Figure 1 will be investigated: the organisation, the mobbing perpetrator, the social system of the work group, and the mobbing victim. In the case of a supervisor, there is usually some overlap between the perpetrator, the social system and the organisation.
As can be seen in Figure 1, there are organisational and social factors, as well as factors in the person of the mobber and of the victim which may cause mobbing. Mobbing may lead to various forms of ill health. The figure also illustrates one of the central problems in mobbing research: it is unclear whether cause-effect relations go from the left to the right. There are, for example, causes of mobbing in the organisation that may lead to observable mobbing behavior. Mobbing may lead to health complaints in the victim. However, one can equally assume that the causal path goes from the right to the left. Anxious, depressive or obsessive behavior of the victim may produce a negative reaction in the group, which leads to mobbing after some time (refer to the literature showing that people tend to show negative responses to depressive behaviour (Sacco et al., 1993)). Mobbing may lead to a decrease in the social climate and social support, which in turn may weaken the information flow. Again, this may increase job stressors such as uncertainty (about goal achievement) and organisational problems.
What makes the discussion of the various potential causes of mobbing difficult is that cause is often equated with guilt. For example, physically disabled individuals may show a higher mobbing rate than the non-disabled. If, to the best of our knowledge, all other possible explanations could be ruled out, then even a cross-sectional study would not provide statistical evidence that being physically disabled increases the likelihood of being mobbed (and not the other way round). The reason is that variables such as gender, age or physical handicaps cannot be influenced by other psychological variables (see Zapf et al., 1996). However, it makes little sense to "blame" the physically disabled for those variables. One might argue that if handicapped individuals carry a higher risk of being mobbed in a certain organisation then this is a problem of the social group, which is not able to deal with people who are different. That is, the "true cause" in such cases may lie in the social group and not in the victim. Obviously, the assignment of guilt is a question of interpretation.
Finally, leadership problems or organisational problems cannot "harass" an employee. Such behaviour is only possible for human beings. In such cases, there must always be people who react to these problems. In a statistical sense, however, it is possible to speak of the organisation as the cause of mobbing. A way to explain this is that mobbing is understood as an unresolved escalated conflict, the frequency of which depends on the absolute frequency of conflicts in a given organisation. If various organisational circumstances contribute to the total number of conflicts, then the number of unresolved conflicts should also increase, thus leading to a higher number of mobbing cases in the organisation.
The present exploratory study does not aim to "prove" any causal effects. However, by combining several data sources and being mindful of the objections that have been discussed, the paper provides empirical evidence for all of the suggested causes of mobbing shown in Figure 1.
Method
Samples
The research question was examined using two samples. The first sample (Konstanz sample) was collected between October 1995 and July 1998, and consisted of 96 mobbing victims and a control sample of N = 37. The mobbing victims in this sample were recruited by means of newspaper articles on mobbing, local broadcasting, mobbing self-help groups and by the help of a German organisation called "Society against Psycho-social Stress and Mobbing GPSM". The control group was collected by a snowball system starting with persons personally known to members of the project. As far as possible, the control group was matched with the mobbing group according to gender, age, and education. The second sample (N = 118) was collected by the Deutsche Angestellten-Gewerkschaft DAG Stuttgart. The DAG published an article about the mobbing project in an internal journal, and interested job stewards were asked to distribute questionnaires. Although the Konstanz sample consisted of more severe mobbing cases (longer mean duration of mobbing, higher scores on the mobbing scales below), the results of both samples were very similar. For reasons of parsimony and clarity both samples were collapsed for this article.
To define the mobbing group, two criteria that were used in the literature (Zapf, 1999) were combined. First, in accordance with Leymann (1993b; 1996), at least one out of a list of mobbing items had to be answered positively in the sense that the specific mobbing behavior lasted at least six months and that one of the mobbing behaviors occurred at least once a week. The second criterion was that participants agreed that they were a victim of mobbing according to the definition that was presented in the questionnaire. The definition was "Mobbing at work means harassing, bullying, offending, socially excluding someone or assigning offending work tasks to someone in the course of which the person confronted ends up in an inferior position". The definition was given after the list of mobbing items was presented (see Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996, who used a very similar definition). To label something mobbing (bullying) it has to occur repeatedly (for example, at least once a week) and over a period of time (at least six months). It is not mobbing if the incident is an isolated event or if two parties of approximately equal "strength" are in conflict. The mobbing group (N = 143) consisted of participants for whom both criteria (item and definition) applied.
The second sample, the control group (N = 81), consisted of people for whom both criteria did not apply. A total of 27 participants were excluded from the study because of missing data or because only one criterion applied. Of the sample, 57 percent were women. The mean age was 42 years and 30 percent of the sample had some type of university degree.
Instruments
To measure potential causes of mobbing in the organisation, some scales of the "Instrument for Stress-oriented Job Analysis" (ISJA, version 5.1) (Semmer et al., 1995; 1999; Zapf, 1993) were used. The scales were job complexity, task-related job control, time-related job control, uncertainty, organisational problems, concentration necessities, time pressure and compulsory co-operation.
In addition, several scales measuring aspects of the social system were used. A scale of social stressors (Frese and Zapf, 1987) comprised items referring to the social climate in the work group, and conflicts with colleagues and supervisors. A German version of the social support scales developed by Caplan (Caplan et al., 1975) and adapted by Frese (1989) comprised, among others, a subscale of social support by colleagues. Moreover, we translated the Employee Opinion Survey of Lawthom et al. (1992), and a scale measuring a positive communication climate was applied in this study.
Further, there were 45 items referring to aspects according to which the mobbing victims saw themselves being different from the rest of the work group (stigmatisation items, see Zapf and Bühler, 1998). From these items a scale "unassertiveness/avoidance" was developed.
To measure conflict behaviour we used a German translation of the Rahim Organisational Conflict Inventory - ROCI II (Rahim and Magner, 1995) measuring five conflict styles: avoiding, compromising, dominating, integrating and obliging.
Mobbing behaviour was measured with the help of a German translation of the Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terrorisation LIPT (Leymann, 1990). We extended the Leymann questionnaire and constructed six mobbing scales published in Zapf et al. (1996). The first scale was mobbing by organisational measures, which included questioning a person's decisions, judging a person's job performance wrongly or in an offending manner, and assigning degrading tasks to the person concerned. The second scale was social isolation, which included one does not talk to the person concerned, and being treated like air or non-existent. The third scale was attacking the private sphere which included permanently criticizing a person's private life, making a person look stupid, and suspecting a person to be psychologically disturbed. The fourth scale was verbal aggression, which included shouting at or cursing loudly at a person, and verbal threats. The fifth scale was physical aggression, which included threat of physical violence, and minor use of violence. The sixth scale was rumours, which included saying nasty things about a person behind his or her back.
Psychological dysfunctioning was measured using various scales developed by Mohr (1986). Self-esteem was measured with items like "I am proud of my achievements". Depression was measured with items like "I feel lonesome, even when together with other people" or "I look forward to the future hopelessly". Anxiety comprised items such as "I prefer to avoid difficult situations" or "Sudden noise at night frightens me". A scale of psychosomatic complaints included items such as "how often do you suffer from headaches, high blood pressure, insomnia". In addition, we applied a German translation of the PANAS scale of Watson et al. (1988) measuring negative and positive affect.
Finally, we used items first developed by Knorz to ask the participants of the study for their opinion about why they experienced mobbing (see Zapf et al., 1995; see the description below). Psychometric properties of the scales are summarised in Table I. Descriptive data of the variables .
Results
The perpetrator as a cause of mobbing
First, we analysed a series of questions about the reasons for mobbing from the victims' perspective. The first item listed was: "Because of which reasons have you been treated so negatively by your colleagues, supervisors or subordinates?" As can be seen in Table II. Causes of mobbing: the victim's view (in %) , the most frequently reported reason was "They wanted to push me out of the company". Typically, this is believed to be the final goal of a mobbing process (Leymann, 1993b; 1996). Only 9 percent disagreed with this statement. The second most frequently reported reason was "a hostile person influenced others". At least from the victims' perspective the cause of mobbing is often seen in a specific perpetrator. These results replicate findings of an earlier study (Zapf et al., 1995).
The organisation as a cause of mobbing
Table II shows that the organisational climate, high stress and organisational problems are among the most frequent causes for mobbing from the victims' perspective. Two subsequent analyses were conducted on these results. First, we compared mobbing victims and the control group with regard to working conditions (Zapf and Osterwalder, 1998). Clearly, the mobbing group differed from the control group with regard to all job characteristics. There were higher stressors and less job control for the mobbing group. Further, the strongest effects appeared for task and time-related control, uncertainty and organisational problems. Interestingly, job complexity was the only item where no differences appeared. This probably reflects the fact that mobbing can occur at lower and higher levels of the organisational hierarchy. Typically, at the lower levels, there are also lower levels of occupational skills, and less complex tasks. While at higher levels of the organisation skill levels are higher, managers and specialist workers who work on more complex tasks also become the target of workplace harassment.
To validate the self-reported statements of mobbing victims about the causes of mobbing, we chose the item "organisational problems" (see Table II). An analysis of variance was conducted by comparing four groups: individuals disagreeing, partly agreeing, and agreeing with the above mentioned item, plus the control group. Significant results were found when "organisational problems" from the job analysis instrument (see Table I) were used as the dependent variable. The Scheffé post hoc test (p < 0.05) showed that the control group differed significantly from all other groups. However, the group disagreeing with the statement that organisational problems are a cause, also reported significantly less organisational problems than those who agreed with this item.
These analyses support the victim's interpretation that the organisation is the reason why mobbing occurred. It is unlikely that this result is a mere artifact of the self-report data because the information was gathered in quite different ways. The participants had to answer the job analysis questionnaire first. It would be impossible for them to assess whether they are high or low compared to others, and so give the "correct" answer when they responded to the "causes of mobbing" questions. While bad working conditions can result from the mobbing process, it seems unlikely that this holds for all cases. In combination with the "reasons for mobbing" items it is claimed that organisational problems are the cause of mobbing in at least some cases (see Zapf and Osterwalder, 1998).
The victim and the social system as causes of mobbing
In the list of reasons in Table II, there are several items suggesting that the reasons for at least some of the mobbing cases may lie in the victims themselves. It is interesting to see that these items are mostly at the end of the table. Altogether, 32 percent of the victims agree with one of these items. As discussed in the introduction, there is a difference between finding a cause and assigning guilt or responsibility. It is sometimes difficult to say whether the cause is in the victim or in the social group that, for some reason, is not able to integrate a person who is different from them in some respect.
It is noticeable that only 2 percent of the victims "admitted" that their performance was below average. Practical experience suggests that this figure should be higher, and the question arises as to whether mobbing victims are open to taking such personal reasons into account. Examples of personal reasons include deficits in social skills, low performance, "being difficult" (such as being pedantic about accuracy), or being aggressive or moaning.
The list of 45 items referring to aspects according to which the mobbing victims saw themselves being different from the rest of the work group (Zapf and Bühler, 1998) comprised several items referring to a lack of social skills and unassertive behaviour. An example is "I do not recognise conflicts as quickly as others". Zapf and Bühler (1998) constructed a scale "Unassertiveness/avoidance" and investigated the relationship with other variables. A hypothesis was that being unassertive, tending to avoid conflicts, or showing little effort to be a member of the group increase the likelihood of becoming a mobbing victim. Clearly, not all mobbing victims would have low levels of communication or social skills. Rather, it is likely that there is a subgroup that have lower social skills levels, while others may not differ from the control group.
Some of the items listed as "reasons for mobbing" supported the hypothesis about the victim as a cause. Subjects high in unassertiveness/avoidance more often said that their performance was below average (c 2 = 7.95, p = 0.093); that they were bullied because of their nationality (c 2 = 9.66, p = 0.047); and because of a bodily handicap (c 2 = 8.70, p = 0.069). Results for conflict style and psychological wellbeing are shown in Table III. Conflict styles and psychological wellbeing for mobbing victims with different levels of unassertiveness/avoidance and control group . People high in unassertiveness/avoidance showed the worst conflict resolution behaviour with regard to all strategies except dominating. In three of five cases, this group differed from the low unassertiveness/avoidance group. The strongest effect appeared for the "avoiding" conflict style. This is not surprising given the high content overlap between the unassertiveness/avoidance scale and the ROCI avoidance scale. Moreover, the low unassertiveness/avoidance group showed results comparable with those of the control group.
The group high in unassertiveness/avoidance reported a significantly higher level of anxiety and depression compared with all other groups and a higher level of negative affect than the control group and the group low in unassertiveness. By contrast, psychosomatic complaints, which are a typical strain indicator used in organisational stress research, differentiated the control group from all mobbing groups. It is interesting to note that concepts such as anxiety, depression and negative affect have been related to neuroticism. Watson and Clark (1984) differentiated the high unassertiveness/avoidance group from all other groups, whereas the strain indicator psychosomatic complaints differentiated the groups that are under high stress, namely the mobbing groups from the control group. It is not suggested here that the variables related to neuroticism cannot be affected by environmental circumstances at all (see the discussion in Spector et al., in press). However, in the present context, the trait-like character of neuroticism variables has to be taken into consideration. Based on these findings, it can be hypothesised that there is a group of individuals who had pre-existing symptoms of anxiety, depression and negative affect. This group of mobbing victims has lower social skills than their colleagues and show deficiencies in their social behaviour and, thus, they have an increased likelihood of becoming a victim of mobbing. These individuals are not very sensitive to conflict, and they are unable to build up a stable social network. They avoid conflict as far as possible, and, if this is impossible, they tend to give way. By contrast, there are other victims of mobbing who do not show these characteristics and who cannot be statistically differentiated from the control group with the exception of psychosomatic complaints. The latter result indicates that regardless of the cause, mobbing is a severe stressor.
As a final step, we tried to build groups according to the four mentioned causes of mobbing using all the information described in this article (see Table IV. Causes of mobbing and their relationship with job characteristics, mobbing behavior, conflict styles and wellbeing ). The "organisation as cause group" consisted of those agreeing that organisational problems were a cause of mobbing (see Table II) and showed a high score on the organisational problems scale (> 3.0), but who did not say that that their social climate was extremely harsh. Members of this group were also not in the extreme group of unassertiveness/avoidance. The "perpetrator group" agreed with the item that there was one hostile person in the organisation (see Table II). However, the "perpetrator group" did not fulfil the criteria of the other groups, such as scores on the organisational problems scale. The "social system group" showed low scores on the social support by colleagues scale (< 2.0) and the scale measuring the communication climate (< 2.0). In addition, they agreed with the item that the organisational climate was a reason for mobbing (Table II). Finally, the "victims group" was identical with the group high in unassertiveness/avoidance in Table III.
Looking first at job characteristics shows that the "social system as a cause of mobbing" group and the "organisation as a cause of mobbing" group showed worse working conditions than the others. Significant results appeared for uncertainty, organisational problems and time pressure. Not surprisingly, the "social system" group showed the highest social stressors at work.
With regard to conflict styles, the "victims" group differed from the "perpetrator" group. Significant results appeared for the avoiding and integrating conflict styles. With regard to mobbing, the "social system as a cause" group had to deal with the highest level of mobbing and the "perpetrator" group with the lowest level. Interestingly, significant differences appeared only in relation to the item "attacking the private sphere", and a tendency appeared for the items "organisational measures" and "verbal aggression".
With regard to wellbeing, the "victims" group showed higher scores for anxiety, depression and negative affect than the other groups, and lower scores in self-esteem. Comparatively low levels occurred for the "social system" and the "perpetrator" groups. However, no such differences occurred for psychosomatic complaints. Although it is not statistically significant, it is the "social system" group that reports the highest level of psychosomatic complaints.
Discussion
This article investigated causes of mobbing at work. Being aware that it is difficult to prove cause and effect with regard to mobbing at the current stage of mobbing research, material was presented suggesting that various causes of mobbing have to be considered rather than favoring one-sided explanations. Unfortunately, such explanations dominate some of the scientific and popular literature on mobbing, and among practitioners. Some physicians prefer the view that the mobbing victims are the cause of mobbing. Employers sometimes tend to share this position and from many anecdotal reports it is known that the victims, not the perpetrators, are forced to leave the organisation (Leymann, 1993b; 1996). From the perspective of the organisation this is often easier, particularly if managers are among the mobbers. Physicians may often be unaware that they deal with a selected group of mobbing victims. Those individuals who are more or less accidental victims of a bully usually have no long-term contact with physicians. These victims are often surprised at suddenly being the victim of harassment after a long period of working life without any substantial problems and they desperately try to solve the conflict, often by leaving the organisation and finding another job elsewhere. For these victims, there is usually no need for a psychiatric assessment. Psychiatrists are more often confronted with individuals who belong to the "victims as a cause" group. As shown in Table IV, these victims suffer from more serious health symptoms than the other groups. They are more often in need of psychiatric treatment, and they are frequently unable to continue working while being mobbed. These victims are less able to recover from the mobbing process once it is over, and they are more often engaged in fighting their case long after leaving the organisation.
It is interesting to see that a single perpetrator seems to play a more important role in the British literature (Adams with Crawford, 1992; Field, 1996; Rayner, 1997). As mentioned in the introduction, this may partly be due to the terminology used. The Scandinavian and German research seems to be more focussed on the victim attacked by one or more persons, whereas British research and practice seems to be more focussed on the attacker. It is difficult to assess whether the finding (see Table II) showing 62 percent of mobbing to be caused by a certain perpetrator is realistic. There may be cases where the cause lies in the organisation but is manifested by a specific individual. Alternatively, the cause could lie primarily in the social system, with a specific individual seen as the ringleader. Attribution theory (Baron, 1990) suggests that people tend to make personal attributions. That is, they prefer to blame other people for an action rather than attribute the situation to non-human factors such as time pressures or job complexity. However, even if the above mentioned 62 percent is an exaggerated figure, it seems unlikely that almost two-thirds of the sample completely misperceive or misinterpret their situation.
Leymann (1993b) reports many cases showing that poor work organisation and leadership problems are related to mobbing. Results from Einarsen et al. (1994), Vartia (1996) and Zapf and Osterwalder (1998) support this view. They all found relationships between the frequency of mobbing and organisational variables. However, as shown in Figure 1, it must be considered that negative working conditions can be a result of mobbing. This may arise from a lack of communication, conscious miscommunication, which in itself is a mobbing strategy, or various kinds of conflicts that affect cooperation and information flow. On the other hand it seems plausible that in workplaces that are low in control and high in organisational problems, for example, time pressure, uncertainty due to unclear responsibilities and role ambiguities, the probability of conflict due to these organisational problems is high. The idea is simple: a higher base rate of conflict in organisations leads to a higher rate of escalating conflict which in turn are the basis for mobbing. Moreover, high scores in organisational problems and uncertainty might also be indications of long-term, entrenched conflict that heighten the potential for mobbing to develop.
It is interesting to see that the "victims" group, which is rather low in work and social stressors, and medium in mobbing, shows the highest scores in anxiety, depression and negative affect. By contrast, the "social system" group, which is highest in job stressors, social stressors and mobbing, show the lowest scores in anxiety, depression and negative affect. While it is not statistically significant, the "social system" group shows the highest mean in psychosomatic complaints. Anxiety and depression have been discussed both as independent and dependent variables in the stress process (e.g., Spector et al., in press). Whereas psychosomatic complaints are somewhat higher in the group where work and social stressors and mobbing is high, and thus reflect the idea that stressors cause strain, this is not the case for anxiety and depression. This picture can, therefore, be taken as an indication that a number of factors contribute to the likelihood of becoming a victim of mobbing. Such factors include a high level of anxiety and depression and the related behaviours of conflict avoidance; inability to recognise conflict; being shy; and showing little effort to integrate in the work group. On the other hand, it is clear from the data presented that not all victims of mobbing are low in social competencies. As shown in Table III, the mobbing group low in unassertiveness/avoidance does not differ from the control group with regard to conflict behaviour and wellbeing. The exception is psychosomatic complaints.
The literature on communication and conflict has always pointed to the difficulties in analysing the causes of conflicts (Glasl, 1994; Thomas, 1992). First, there is the problem of where to stop in the causal chain of conflict development. Second, there is often more than one factor that contributes to the escalation of a conflict. There may be a person with a tendency to harass others (i.e. the perpetrator as a cause for mobbing). For the perpetrator, it may be easier to harass a person who is an out-group member because of his or her inability to integrate into the group (victim characteristics as causes of mobbing). It may be even easier to harass someone if there are working conditions with high uncertainty and high rates of organisational problems. Such working conditions may lead an individual to commit multiple errors at work, which, in turn, can be used as ammunition against the individual (the organisation as a cause of mobbing). The occurrence of mobbing may be further supported if there are tensions in the work group for which a potential scapegoat is a good " lightning conductor" (the social system as a cause of mobbing). Moreover, there may be factors that contribute to the emergence of conflict, and other factors that contribute to its escalation.
Finally, it has already been mentioned that the identification of a cause of mobbing is sometimes a question of interpretation. If a physical handicap is taken as a reason to harass a person, one may argue that the cause of mobbing lies in the social group that is unable to deal with people who are different. There may be more interpretation problems in the case of a high performing person who is bullied - high achievers are a typical group of mobbing victims (see Zapf and Bühler, 1998). Partly, such problems might occur because it may be unclear whether the high performing person does not conform to group norms, behaviour that is not tolerated by the rest of the group. Alternatively, a group cannot tolerate the high performing person who demonstrates his or her achievements in an arrogant and provocative manner.
The central argument in this article is that there are potentially multiple causes of mobbing. The results presented here are based on an empirical study using a group of mobbing victims and a control sample. Clearly, further empirical research is needed to increase our understanding of the causes of mobbing and implications for individuals, organisations, and society.
Table I. Descriptive data of the variables
Table II. Causes of mobbing: the victim's view (in %)
Table III. Conflict styles and psychological wellbeing for mobbing victims with different levels of unassertiveness/avoidance and control group
Table IV. Causes of mobbing and their relationship with job characteristics, mobbing behavior, conflict styles and wellbeing
Figure 1. Causes and consequences of mobbing
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Copyright © 1999 MCB. All rights reserved International Journal of Manpower, Vol 20 Issue 1/2 Date 1999 ISSN 0143-7720
