Dealing with employees’ frustration in time saves your company from workplace bullying: The mediating roles of frustration and a hostile climate in the relationship between role stress and exposure to workplace bullying

The development of workplace bullying, which involves negative behaviors occurring regularly and over a period of time, is explained by the work environment hypothesis, namely, that it is due to organizational factors, such as leadership practices and organizational climate. Although this has been the predominant theoretical framework for studying workplace bullying, the mechanism whereby particular organizational factors trigger exposure to bullying remains unclear. The present study aims to apply both the revised frustration—aggression theory and the social interactionist perspective of aggression to examine the mechanism responsible for the relationship between role stressors and exposure to bullying. In a two-wave longitudinal study, we collected data from 353 Polish employees. The double mediation analysis revealed the mediating role of both individual frustration, measured in wave 2, and perceived hostile work climate, measured in wave 2, in the relationship between the role stressors measured in wave 1 and exposure to workplace bullying measured in wave 2. The current study sheds light on the mechanism responsible for the relationship between organizational antecedents and exposure to workplace bullying, thus explaining the core assumptions of the work environment hypothesis. The findings suggest that to reduce the risk of workplace bullying development, it is crucial to identify and respond constructively to employees’ frustration and dissatisfaction by, for example, reorganizing work structures that may foster a hostile work climate and mistreatment.