Antecedents of workplace bullying among employees in Germany: Five-year lagged effects of job demands and job resources

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

Objectives: The aim of the present study was to examine the long-term association of job demands and job resources with self-reported exposure to workplace bullying in a representative sample of employees in Germany. Methods: We analysed a nation-wide representative cohort of employees working in the same workplace with a 5-year follow-up (S-MGA; N = 1637). The study contained self-reported measures of psychosocial working conditions, including work pace, amount of work, influence at work, role clarity and quality of leadership, and workplace bullying, and of organisational factors, including organisational restructuring and layoffs. Results: After controlling for bullying and occupational level at baseline, higher baseline levels of organisational restructuring (OR 1.73; 95% CI 1.10–2.70), work pace (1.30; 95% CI 1.01–1.66), and amount of work (1.55; 95% CI 1.21–1.99), and lower baseline levels of influence at work (0.70; 95% CI 0.55–0.90) and quality of leadership (1.99; 0.64; 95% CI 0.50–0.82), were associated with an elevated risk of workplace bullying at follow-up. In all, 90% of cases of self-reported workplace bullying could be attributed to these factors. Conclusions: The study suggests that employees reporting higher demands and lower re-sources, as well as organisational factors such as restructuring, are at a higher long-term risk of being targets of workplace bullying. Interventions aimed at preventing workplace bullying could benefit from a focus on psychosocial working conditions and organisational factors.

Original languageEnglish
Article number10805
JournalInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Volume18
Issue number20
Number of pages13
ISSN1661-7827
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Funding: The 2011/12 and 2017 rounds of the S-MGA study were funded internally by the BAuA (project no. F 2250 and F 2384). This paper was written as part of the project “Longitudinal associations between working and employment conditions, burnout and depressive symptoms” at the BAuA (internally funded project no. F 2460).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

    Research areas

  • Job demands-resources model, Prospective study, Psychosocial working con-ditions, S-MGA, Workplace bullying

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 285401875