e-Campus - Work Wellness Institute

Though bullying behaviour takes place between individuals, bullying is undoubtedly an organisational issue. Many common interventions – such as workplace bullying policies, training, reporting, and complaints investigation – focus on the behaviour itself, overlooking risk factors inherent in the organisational system and weighting the responsibility for bullying prevention and response towards individuals. Going beyond this focus to address the underlying organisational risk factors holds the possibility for ‘designing out’ bullying to provide a safe and healthy work environment.

This seminar will overview the development, testing, and evaluation of an organisational intervention for workplace bullying that addresses people management practices as a root cause of this form of mistreatment. People management practices – such as those used for rostering, distributing workloads, assigning tasks, and appraising performance – offer clear, concrete, modifiable focal points for sustainable and effective bullying prevention by mitigating risks embedded in the organisational context. The intervention process will be described in detail during the seminar, together with outcome (effect) and implementation (process) evaluation evidence from multiple studies. To bring together theory and practice in this area, the seminar will highlight links between the applied research case study examples and the foundational literature on organisational interventions and, where possible, the literature on workplace bullying interventions.