A systematic comparison of three sadism measures and their ability to explain workplace mistreatment over and above the dark triad

The present study investigated a potential antecedent of workplace mistreatment, sadism, which represents the dispositional tendency to engage in cruel, demeaning, or harmful behavior for dominance or pleasure. Time-lagged data from 379 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers showed that sadism positively predicted interpersonal deviance, instigated incivility, and cyberbullying frequency above and beyond the dark triad. Moreover, relative weight analyses consistently identified sadism as the most important predictor of workplace mistreatment compared to other dark triad predictors. This study also sought to identify possible differences among three popular sadism scales. The three scales were interchangeable in terms of predicting the outcomes. Confirmatory factor analyses and differential item functioning analyses both revealed, however, that only the SSIS was invariant across sex groups.     

Le harcèlement : évolution du droit français et problématiques de l’évaluation des victimes

Medical doctors are often asked by patients victim of harassment, or even by the authorities, to establish medical certificate. Harassment is a complex phenomenon, covering a wide range of behaviours occurring in multiple situations. The writing of such a certificate can prove to be difficult, can be a cause of legal proceedings for clinicians, especially at a disciplinary level. Moreover, the evaluation is all the more complex since the qualification of harassment by the judge sometimes requires an evaluation of the impact on the victims under the form of a Total Work Incapacity (TWI) duration, but not under all the circumstances existing in French law. In this article, we first propose to address general consideration towards the writing of the certificate, before doing a systematic review of the successive evolutions of French penal and labour law regarding harassment in its most frequent forms. Finally, we propose to address the matter of victims evaluation, especially towards TWI duration evaluation, which does not seem to us an adapted tool regarding the fact that harassment is usually a chronical and durable phenomenon.     

Leader mistreatment,employee hostility,and deviant behaviors: Integrating self-uncertainty and thwarted needs perspectives on deviance

Integrating self-uncertainty management and thwarted needs perspectives on leader mistreatment and workplace deviance, we examine when and why leader mistreatment is associated with workplace deviance. We propose that competence uncertainty strengthens the relationship between leader mistreatment and workplace deviance and that hostility mediates this interactive effect. Four field studies and one experiment support the hypotheses. The first two studies provide evidence for the predicted interaction between leader mistreatment and competence uncertainty, and the next three studies demonstrate that hostility mediates this interactive effect. We discuss an extended social exchange explanation of workplace deviance and highlight the psychological interplay between motives, cognition, and affect in reciprocating leader mistreatment.     

Dimensions of Support Among Abused Women in the Workplace

The authors draw on social support theory to examine supervisor support match (support wanted and received), support mismatch (support not wanted and received) and work outcomes for abused low‐wage working women, and to determine if supervisor support match and mismatch are more strongly associated with work outcomes than global supervisor support Face‐to‐face interviews were conducted with a community sample of abused, employed women who have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) in the past year (N = 163). Using hierarchical regression, we found, after accounting for global supervisor support; a higher level of supervisor support match was associated with greater job satisfaction, fewer job reprimands and less job termination. Findings from the study inform theories of social support and have practical implications for workplace interventions for IPV.     

Supervisory interpretation of safety climate versus employee safety climate perception: Association with safety behavior and outcomes for lone workers

Research has shown that safety climate predicts safety behavior and safety outcomes in a variety of settings. Prior studies have focused on traditional work environments in which employees and supervisors work in the same location and the mechanisms through which safety climate affects behavior are largely understood. However, the nascent research examining safety climate among lone workers suggests that safety climate may have some uniqueness in this context. Based on leadership theories and utilizing an exploratory approach, this study increases our understanding of the lone worker context by examining employee perception of safety climate and supervisory interpretation of safety climate; how similar or different they are, and how they are related to important safety outcomes. Surveys were administered to a matched sample of 1831 truck drivers and their 219 supervisors at four different trucking companies. Objective data on employee injuries were collected six months after survey administration. The results provided support for the measurement equivalence of the Trucking Safety Climate Scale at the organization level for both employee and supervisor respondents. For both organization- and group-level safety climate, employee perceptions of safety climate and supervisory interpretation of safety climate were significantly different, such that supervisors provided higher ratings for both safety climate sub-scales. Further, only employee safety climate perceptions significantly predicted self-reported safety behavior (directly) and objective injury outcomes (indirectly). This suggests that when trying to gauge and improve upon a trucking company’s safety climate, we should rely on employee perspectives, rather than supervisory interpretation, of safety climate.     

Workplace mobbing and bystanders' helping behaviour towards victims: The role of gender,perceived responsibility and anticipated stigma by association

We examined victims' perceived responsibility and bystanders' anticipated risk of being victimized themselves when others associate them with the victim (stigma by association, SBA) as possible antecedents of bystanders' helping behaviour towards a victim of workplace mobbing, and explored the effects of gender. Guided by the attribution model of social conduct (Weiner, 2006), a 2 × 2 vignette experiment was conducted. Participants were Dutch regional government employees (N = 161). Path analyses generally supported the hypotheses, but showed different results for women and men. In the strong (Vs. weak) responsibility condition, women reported less sympathy and more anger and men only more anger, which resulted in lower helping intention. Additionally, for men the results showed an unexpected direct positive effect of responsibility on helping intention. Furthermore, in the strong SBA condition, women and men reported more fear and men, unexpectedly, more anger. Consequently, helping intention decreased. The findings on gender are discussed in the context of social role theory, gender and emotion. Our findings suggest that to prevent and tackle mobbing, organizations and professionals should be aware of the attributional and emotional processes and gender differences in bystanders' helping behaviour.     

Sexual Assault Training in the Military: Evaluating Efforts to End the “Invisible War”

Sexual assault is an insidious problem in the United States military. In 2005 the Department of Defense (DoD) created the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, which centralizes responsibility for sexual assault training. However, this training initiative has undergone little evaluation by outside researchers. Addressing this need, we analyzed responses from over 24,000 active duty personnel who completed the 2010 DoD Workplace and Gender Relations Survey. We assessed whether sexual assault training exposure (None, Minimal, Partial, or Comprehensive) predicted accurate knowledge of sexual assault resources and protocols. Using a social-ecological framework, we investigated whether institutional and individual factors influenced Service members’ training exposure and judgment of training effectiveness. According to our results, exposure to comprehensive training predicted lower sexual assault incidence and superior knowledge. However, comprehensive training differed as a function of military branch, rank, gender, and sexual assault history. Judgments of training effectiveness also varied across these dimensions. Our results highlight the importance of considering context, gender, and victimization history when evaluating institutional efforts to end sexual violence. The DoD’s 2010 annual report on military sexual assault concluded that “most Active Duty members receive effective training on sexual assault” (p. 104). Our results cast doubt on that assertion.     

Well-being through learning: a systematic review of learning interventions in the workplace and their impact on well-being

The view that learning is central to well-being is widely held and the workplace is an important setting in which learning takes place. Evaluations of the effectiveness of well-being interventions in work settings are commonplace, but to date, there has been no systematic review of the effectiveness of learning interventions with regard to their impact on well-being. The review synthesizes evidence from 41 intervention studies, and although no studies report a negative impact on well-being, 14 show no effect on well-being, with 27 studies having a positive impact. We classify the studies according to the primary purpose of the learning intervention: to develop personal resources for well-being through learning; to develop professional capabilities through learning; to develop leadership skills through learning; and to improve organizational effectiveness through organizational-level learning. Although there is an abundance of workplace learning interventions, few are evaluated from a well-being perspective despite the commonly held assumption that learning yields positive emotional and psychological outcomes. The evidence indicates an important gap in our evaluation of and design of workplace learning interventions and their impact on well-being, beyond those focusing on personal resources. This raises important theoretical and practical challenges concerning the relationship between learning and well-being in the context of professional capability enhancement, leadership capability and organizational learning.     

Seeing the unseen: ostracism interventionary behaviour and its impact on employees

This article outlines the development and validation of the ostracism interventionary behaviour (OIB) scale. Based on in-depth interviews with employees, leaders, and content experts in addition to 603 survey respondents from Canada and the United States, 3 dimensions emerged to describe the ways in which leaders confront workplace ostracism-related cues and a measure was created to assess them. These refer to the ability for leaders to foster an inclusive workgroup dynamic and enact effective third-party interpersonal interventions through displays of (1) social awareness, (2) proactivity, and (3) harmony-seeking behaviour. In addition to possessing convergent and discriminant validity, the OIB scale demonstrated criterion-related validity through its relation with perceived workplace ostracism and well-being. Furthermore, evidence supported the scale’s test–retest reliability and predictive validity over and above leader–member exchange. Overall, the measure was found to be both reliable and valid, with important implications for the effective management of instances of ostracism at work.     

Combined effects of workplace bullying and perceived organizational support on employee behaviors: does resource availability help?

Background and Objective: This research examines the detrimental effects of workplace bullying as a social stressor on employees’ job performance, organizational retaliatory behaviors, and organizational citizenship behaviors and how the availability of support can reduce the negative impact of bullying. Using social exchange theory and the conservation of resources theory as theoretical frameworks, we propose that workplace bullying drains personal resources, leading to reduced job performance, low citizenship behaviors, and increased organizational retaliatory behaviors. We also propose that perceived organizational support acts as moderator, such that it reduces the detrimental effects of bullying on employee behaviors.

Research Design and Methods: We tested our hypotheses in two field studies (N?=?478 and N?=?395) conducted in Pakistan.

Results: The results of both studies supported the assertion that workplace bullying exacerbates employees’ job performance, reduces organizational citizenship behaviors and intensifies organizational retaliatory behaviors. The idea that perceived organizational support would moderate the bullying-work behavior relationships found mixed support. While perceptions of organizational support reinforced the bullying-job performance and bullying-retaliatory behaviors relationships, it did not moderate the bullying-citizenship behaviors relationship in the suggested direction.

Conclusion: The findings show that workplace bullying leads to more organizational citizenship behaviors when employee’s perceptions of organizational support is high.