Is Workplace Bullying Responsible for Low Job Performance? A Twofold SEM-ANN Approach

Workplace bullying is one of the phenomenal supervisory tool using in the garment industry of Bangladesh. The productivity of this industry workers are the lowest as compared with its competitors such as China, Vietnum, India, Thailand, Pakistan, Srilanka, Combodia etc. Therefore, the primary purpose of this study was to examine whether the workplace bullying responsible for low job performance in the garment industry of Bangladesh. The study is based on quantitative data, collected through a survey questionnaire adapted from previous studies. The target population was the workers from the ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh. Moreover, simple random sampling technique was used to collect 384 samples. Additionally, Smart-PLS 3.3.9 and SPSS (v23) were employed for preliminary data examination and to examine the proposed hypotheses. A two-fold SEM-ANN approach was used to validate the proposed model of the study. The findings of the study revealed that workplace bullying negatively effect on employees’ job performance. Psychological stress and burnout play a negative mediating effect between workplace bullying and job performance. Additionally, perceived organizational support plays a significant moderating role among workplace bulling and its outcome variables such as job performance, psychological stress, burnout, and organizational citizenship behaviour. However, organizational citizenship behavior does not play any significant mediating role in the relationship between workplace bulling and job performance. The study has been unique in nature, as it focuses on the workers in in the developing country context like Bangladesh where the employees encounter tremendously with bulling from supervisor and higher management as their regular practice. The outcomes of the consequences are psychological stress, burnout, organizational citizenship behaviors, and low job performance enormously which has been highlighted in the current study.