The Experience of Bullying in Great Britain: The Impact of Organizational Status

A number of studies recently undertaken in Europe, the US, and Australia into workplace bullying and closely related issues, under labels such as “mobbing” and “emotional abuse”, have documented the presence and severity of these problems. However, prevalence figures vary greatly between individual studies and between countries. In part this discrepancy reflects the use of different research methods. In general two main approaches may be identified: one group of studies follows, broadly speaking, the approach developed by Leymann (1992), where respondents are presented with an inventory of negative behaviours identified with bullying. Bullying is then operationalized by defining the criteria for when a person is being bullied. In Leymann’s study of bullying in Sweden, bullying was defined as weekly or more frequent exposure to at least one negative act or behaviour for a period of at least 6 months. In line with this approach Leymann found that 3.5% of respondents in his representative study of the Swedish working population were bullied. In an Austrian replica study the results span 17.5% to 26.6% depending upon occupational group surveyed (Niedl, 1995). By contrast, an alternative method has been to measure the prevalence of bullying by means of a “global” definition of bullying. Thus, those who consider their experience within a certain timescale to fit the definition will be considered to have been bullied.