Keynote: Preventing and managing workplace bullying: The need for a well-functioning ethical infrastructure

Preventing and managing workplace bullying: The need for a well-functioning ethical infrastructure

Ståle Einarsen
University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Abstract
After 30 years of research on the issue of workplace bullying, it is time to sum up the implications of our main research findings for how organization may and should prevent and manage workplace bullying and to start looking for a comprehensive organizational response to this pertinent problem. Research show that targeted individuals have a hard time managing such problems on their own, hence, an organizational strategy is needed. Furthermore, some studies indicate that the relationship between exposure to bullying and individual level outcomes, such as health and well-being, is strongest for presumably well-functioning targets with good individual resources and abilities when it comes to managing stress.

Hence, organizations should not focus on preventing and managing workplace bullying in order to protect its vulnerable employees, but to secure that the healthy and strong remains that way. Furthermore, we will introduce the concept of ethical infrastructures as an overarching organizational approach to the prevention and management of workplace bullying. Ethical infrastructures are the formal and informal systems that govern how and to what extent an organization actively prevents and effectively handles cases of unethical behaviors among its organization members, in our case the enactment of workplace harassment and bullying.

In a range of Norwegian and other Nordic studies, some published some fresh, we will look at how such systems are related to the actual successful management of individual case, to the overall prevalence of the problem in the organization, as well as how such systems may act to prevent and reduce the effect of other known risk factors in the organization. An important concept in this regard is the concept of conflict management climate which is related to both less bullying and to reduced effects of risk factors such as role stressors. Data from studies among all Norwegian municipalities will be presented on the relationships between such elements in the ethical infrastructure and the management of complaints of bullying as well as the overall prevalence of workplace bullying.