Team Related and Job Related Risk Factors for Bullying (Essay Sample)

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Organizational, Team Related and Job Related Risk Factors for Bullying, Violence and Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: A Qualitative Study
Organizations need to have good environments that allow social interactions to foster the well-being of employees and subsequently, the organization itself. Negative acts such as sexual harassment, bullying, and violence at workplaces often cause dissatisfaction with employee's work, reduced motivation at work, lowered organizational commitment, and additional organizational costs. These negative acts are a common result from poor interpersonal relationships at workplaces. The greatest number of research works conducted in the area of risk factors emanating from work-related negative acts including violence, sexual harassment, and bullying are all based on the real experiences of actual victims who have been directly involved in such acts. Many researchers have associated negative acts to characteristics of any given job. Such job characteristics include low autonomy, role conflict, job insecurity, noisy work environments, crowdedness, high workload, and absence of feedback.
This article, based on qualitative research, employs a divergent methodology whereby members of an organization who have experienced some of these work-related negative acts are interviewed. The study concentrated on identifying team, organizational, and work related risk factors that may be the reason for the perpetration and/or victimization of such negative acts. Moreover, the study focuses on appreciating the role of perpetration and/or victimization of the risk factors in the negative acts process. Past studies in this topic had identified several risk factors. The findings of this study benefited from interviewing 126 participants in a semi-structured interview.
The findings revealed that among the factors that result in negatives acts were: work content, work relations, work conditions, and the environment where the participants worked seemed –all at the job level. Regarding both organizational and team level factors, absence of balance with respect to social atmosphere, worker's well-being versus organizational goals, and organizational chain of command seemed to result in negative acts. Conversely, the presence of balance in respect of these aspects appeared to avert over and above terminating the negative acts.
The study revealed that four processes promote the negative acts within a work environment. The first process involves organizational, job, and team factors that may provoke personal stress or obstructions and may possibly restrain the ability of employees in trying to deal with with such situations. The second process involves a team, job, and organizational factors that may possibly promote emergence of conflicts, which in turn may perhaps affect the worker's style of managing work-related conflicts. The third process this research revealed is that a team's characteristics and those of the organization such as gossiping culture might be responsible for directly promoting or even enabling the negative acts. The last process involves negative acts including team, change job, organizational factors, and influence. This process has the potential of encouraging stresses, more bullying, violence within working environments, sexual harassment, and new frustrations.
The findings further show that interpersonal conflicts are the recipe for violent acts while inadequate capacity to manage conflicts lead to higher chances of violent acts. Stress and job related frustrations do not significantly influence acts that lead to sexual harassment except when such behaviors lead to interpersonal conflict. However, bullying seems to be the global act that fits well with work related negative acts.
Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: A Primer
Sexual harassment within a working or job environment is not a contemporary problem. However, the legal liability for it is recent. In spite of proliferating publicity of the threats associated with sexual harassment, surveys conducted in the past have continually shown that numerous businesses with their operations in the United States of America have not yet deal with this problem. In fact, the most current news reports show that this vice has reached its peak levels in terms of management. This is because even though businesses are aware of the problem's existence, they are not certain of how to deal with it. Consequently, the employer keeps on bearing liability for such acts at workplaces.
The dangers of not adopting an appropriate preemptive and forceful standpoint in an attempt to address this problem can potentially result in many problems. Some of the resulting problems or risks include significant reduction in the morale of workers, expensive litigations, reduced performance of employees and the business as well, and the marring of a company's reputation within public circles. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of failure in trying to arrest this issue in good time is evidenced in the inability of businesses to take firm positions in respect of this issue.
Unfortunately, the costs associated with risks from sexual harassment have significantly escalated in the contemporary period. For this reason, the Congress made changes to Title VII in the year 1991 to allow sexual harassment victims obtain recovery of damages as covered under the federal law. An example of such damages allowed for recovery was punitive damages. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1993, made it easier for victims of sexual violence to reach this law when it made it far much easier for them to prove any injury caused them. Consequently, the negative act of sexual harassment within the context of work environment is one such present-day threat to the thriving of an enterprise. If companies fail to respond to the outcry and stipulations of the law, they will have to face heightened risk of liability for its non-observance.
Therefore, for the businesses to be wise, they must comprehend sexual harassment in its entirety. They must not only try understanding the scary statistics around sexual harassment at workplaces that often cover the problem itself, but also consider the available victims' legal platforms, present legislative trends, and the manner in which businesses can safeguard their interests. This article serves as a primer for attorneys especially in times of giving advice to their clients on matters pertaining to the issue of workplace related sexual harassment.
This paper describes not only the scope of sexual harassment but also the severity of this problem. Further, the study assesses the newly firmed up federal law that administers justice as applied to the area of sexual harassment within a workplace. This is a strong legal in response to the problems of the past where victims of sexual harassment did not find refuge in the federal law as they frequently found themselves in a legal dilemma. Lastly, the paper recommends the creation of clear company policies and procedures with the purpose of instituting and instigating a sexual harassment policy. However, the full application of the policy requires a substantial investment of human resources and time –applied aggressively, consistently, and quickly. The benefits of companies observing federal law in regards to sexual harassment include improved employee productivity, a higher public reputation, reduced healthcare expenses, and lower legal fees.
Interpersonal Mistreatment in the Workplace: The Interface and Impact of General Incivility and Sexual Harassment
Cortina & Lim (2005) discuss about of behaviors conceptualized as general and sexual kinds of harassments in attempt to find out how they are associated and their consequences at the workplace. This paper attempts to summarize the findings of the discussion. Interpersonal mistreatments have been appreciated to constitute various forms of harassments that are of increasing concerns at the workplace with sexual abuses on the lead. Theoretical concepts have been applied to examine these forms of behaviors in the context of sexual harassment. General harassment, sexual coercion and unwanted sexual attention are the three forms of mistreatments that have been seen to quantify sexual harassment. The study further examines how these three forms of sexual harassment relate to their domains adjacent in the context of incivility. That is, where the normal workplace norms have been violated by behaviors directed to cause harm.
Physical aggression is also noted to refer to abnormal expectations of causing harm to another a term which counteracts incivility. That is, a form of abnormality that lacks intentionality. Theoretical concepts have been employed to examine the relationship between sexual harassment and incivility. The desire to dominate occasions sexual aggressors to harass their victims and they also mistreat non-sexually. Gender harassment that involves one being hostile is said to form the link between sexual harassment and incivility. Another relationship is said to be inform of the norm established as a result of the frequency these mistreatments occur to the same employees.
Here, the research study involved examining these relationships at the court workplace. Mathematical equations are employed to test the relationship of the described models of harassments. Further, multivariate analysis of covariance is also adopted to determine the frequency and kind of outcomes of employees. Functions of discrimination are also employed to further examine and analyze the differences on the various types and combinations of interpersonal mistreatments. This study is said to involve a much smaller sample not as big as case study 1 and used the same techniques of conducting research as in case study 1.
Both results showed that there exi...