Navigating the extended reach: Target experiences of cyberbullying at work

Design, development and validation of a workplace cyberbullying measure, the WCM

“…Similar to cyber incivility and cyberaggression, cyberbullying shares the same definitional criteria as its offline equivalent, including repeatedly experiencing behaviours described as inappropriate, negative and hostile (D'Cruz & Noronha, 2013) and a power imbalance between perpetrator and victim (Pivitera & Campbell, 2009;Zhang & Leidner, 2014). Accordingly, workplace cyberbullying has been conceptualised simply as 'bullying via technology' (Coyne et al, 2016).…”

“…This allows perpetrators to send communications whenever they please and it can facilitate anonymity which is the extent that a perpetrator's identity is concealed (Ford, 2013). Anonymous cyberbullying can occur within the working context as employees can create fake email accounts or use pseudonyms to disguise their identity (D'Cruz & Noronha, 2013). DEVELOPMENT OF A WORKPLACE CYBERBULLYING MEASURE 6 A further difference concerns the permanence of certain cyberbullying acts, which distinguishes them from the transience of most traditional bullying behaviours.…”

Organizational Governance: A Promising Solution for Varieties of Workplace Bullying

“…Both internal and external bullying are displayed either as direct, obvious, and in-your-face and/or indirect, subtle, and behind-your-back manifestations (Bloch, 2012;Samnani, 2013), enacted privately and/or publicly (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2006) and involve a single or multiple bully(ies) and target(s) (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2006) over real and/or cyber forms (D'Cruz & Noronha, 2013a). Yet, the direction of internal bullying in interpersonal instances is largely downwards (from superior to subordinate) (Branch et al, 2013;Einarsen et al, 2011), though horizontal (between peers) , upwards (subordinate to superior) (Branch, Ramsay, & Barker, 2007) and/or cross-level co-bullying (where peers and/or subordinates join superiors) (D'Cruz & Rayner, 2012) are also reported.…”

“…Indeed, though interpersonal bullying at work is considered distinctive from harassment arising from membership to social categories such as gender/sex, race, sexuality, caste, religion, illness/disability, etc., many targets indicate their inextricable enmeshment as social identities could trigger interpersonal bullying and categorylinked harassment could precede/follow interpersonal bullying (D'Cruz & Noronha, 2013a). In India, for example, category-based identities are known to prompt upwards bullying either as an independent entity or through cross-level co-bullying (D'Cruz, 2016).…”

“…While one group of researchers seeks to distinguish bullying from category-linked harassment and a second group of scholars argues that these are closely related and hence cannot be differentiated to the point of emphasizing one and excluding or trivializing the other (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2005), targets themselves either fail to separate the two or consider their dual experiences as unified and singular. Thus, while analytical differences are important to tease out the simultaneous and sometimes subtle manifestations of numerous convergent entities, their complex and dynamic intermingling to the point of a nuanced fusion must be acknowledged and deciphered (D'Cruz & Noronha, 2013a) in instances of the interpersonal level of internal bullying and of external bullying.…”