“The Worse You Behave, The More You Seem, to be Rewarded”: Bullying in Nursing as Organizational Corruption

Abstract

This paper reports findings from the first, qualitative stage of a national sequential, mixed method study of bullying in the Australian nursing workplace. Twenty-six nurses who had experience of workplace bullying were recruited from two Australian public sector health care organizations. Examining the narrative data from the viewpoint of bullying being a corrupt activity we present an alternative perspective on group acts of bullying. By exploring bullying as corrupt behaviour, this paper challenges the assumption that bullying can be principally considered a series of isolated events stemming from interpersonal conflict, organizational pressures, or poor work design. Corruption in organizations has not previously been linked with or compared to bullying. In revealing the manner in which actors can engage in corrupt conduct that includes bullying, the findings from our study offer important implications for the management of workplace bullying as a serious and corrupt activity. Key words bullying . mobbing . corruption . organizational behavior . workplace violence Bullying at WorkIn recent decades there has been growing interest in understanding hostile and harmful workplace behaviours such as bullying (Hutchinson et al. 2006a;O'Moore et al. 2003;Vickers 2006). There is considerable evidence that bullying involves repeated, demeaning or destructive acts resulting in harm to both individuals and institutions (Simpson and Employ Respons Rights J

Scientific production on workplace bullying/harassment in dissertations and theses in the Brazilian scenario

“…Thus, this phenomenon at work can cause a number of psychosocial and physiological manifestations. Among the psychosocial are: depression (7) , fatigue, frequent memories of experienced bullying behavior, compromises to life outside of work, extreme sadness in remembering the behaviors (8) , anxiety, loneliness and fear (9) . Among the predominating physiological manifestations are: headache and gastrointestinal complaints, disturbances in sleep pattern, chest pain, palpitations, and an increased or decreased appetite (10) .…”

The Effects of Mobbing on Organizational Cynicism: A Study on Hotels in Turkey

“…al., 1998;McMahon 2000;Hoel and Einarsen, 2003;Pıñuel y Zabala and Oñate Cantero, 2002;Çalışkan, 2005;Demirçivi, 2008;Çarıkçı and Yavuz, 2009;Hutchinson et. al., 2009;Avcı and Kaya, 2010;Karcıoğlu and Akbaş, 2010;Mkono, 2010;Pelit and Kılıç, 2012), are mostly focused on the services sector.…”

“…When studies within the literature related with mobbing are investigated (Leymann, 1990;Zapf, 1999;Mcmahon, 2000;Einarsen et. al., 2001;Naime, 2003;Ferrari, 2004;Einarsen, 2005;Tınaz, 2006;Crawshaw, 2009;Eser, 2009;Hutchinson et. al., 2009;Osif, 2010;Tetik, 2010) briefly, initial studies aimed to describe the concept, to determine preceding and succeeding things, and to determine their impacts on companies and employees, and on the subsequent studies, it is focused to investigate the relations of the issue with other organizational attitude issues (Vartia, 1996;Raver, 2004;Tehrani, 2004;Hallberg and Margaretha, 2006;Sürgevil et.…”

The NHS: Sticking Fingers in Its Ears, Humming Loudly

“…From narrative qualitative research conducted in two Australian public sector health organisations (Hutchinson et al 2009), a link is made between bullying and corruption. ''…participants described bullying, and the organizational systems and processes that perpetuated or condoned the behavior as unethical, corrupt or evil'' (p. 217).…”