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human relations

Perceptions of and reactions to workplace bullying: A social exchange perspective

human relations 63(6) 761–780 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0018726709345043 hum.sagepub.com

Marjo-Riitta Parzefall

European Business School, Wiesbaden, Germany

Denise M Salin

Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland

Abstract The aim of this article is to introduce a social exchange perspective to the study of workplace bullying. Much of the existing research on bullying has had a strong empirical focus, leaving the concept relatively under-theoretized. By applying the social exchange theory based concepts of justice, psychological contract breach, and perceived organizational support, we aim to shed light on a number of aspects of bullying that to date have remained poorly understood. First, drawing on the concepts of justice and contract breach, we highlight the perceptual and subjective element in workplace bullying. Second, the concepts of justice and contract breach allow us to provide insights into how bullying is experienced and the mechanisms through which bullying leads to negative outcomes for both targets and bystanders. Third, the concept of perceived organizational support highlights the importance of appropriate and timely responses to workplace bullying. Finally, we discuss implications for both research and practice. Keywords bullying, harassment, job/employee attitudes, organizational justice, organizational psychology, perceived organizational support, psychological contracts, social exchange theory

Corresponding author: Marjo-Riitta Parzefall, Department of Strategy, Organization and Leadership, European Business School, Soehnleinstrasse 8, Wiesbaden, DE – 65201, Germany. Email: [email protected]

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Introduction In Europe and Australia, and to a growing extent in North America, the term workplace bullying is frequently used to cover different kinds of non-sexual and non-racial harassment in the workplace (Einarsen et al., 2003; Hoel and Cooper, 2000). The focus in most research on bullying has been primarily on studying the prevalence of bullying, on understanding the antecedents of bullying behaviour, and on identifying the impact of bullying on the target (cf. Einarsen et al., 2003; Robinson, 2008). This research has firmly established that workplace bullying is a relatively common phenomena with a number of negative outcomes for both targets and bystanders, including reduced wellbeing, health, job satisfaction, and commitment, as well as increased absenteeism and intentions to leave (Einarsen and Mikkelsen, 2003; Hoel et al., 2003). Despite the growing body of knowledge on workplace bullying, several central questions remain controversial and unanswered. First, relating to the perceptual dimension of workplace bullying, what exactly constitutes bullying is a subject of debate. For example, researchers are not fully unanimous regarding the role of intent to harm in bullying. Second, to date very limited attempts have been made to understand the mechanisms and processes through which the experience of workplace bullying evolves and translates into negative reactions from targets and, above all, from bystanders. This is an important issue, as the experience of bullying ultimately influences evaluations of the employment relationship and its quality as a whole. Third, only little is known about how organizations can offset the negative spirals that perceptions of bullying may trigger among both victims and bystanders. As bullying concerns perceptions of behaviour that reside in a relationship in the context of the workplace, we argue that social exchange theory based (SET-based) concepts, and above all the concepts of organizational justice, psychological contract breach, and perceived organizational support (POS) can shed light on the above identified questions. The concepts of justice, psychological contract breach, and POS capture employees’ perceptions of the quality of their employment relationship and explain how these perceptions translate into subsequent employee attitudes and behaviours (Coyle-Shapiro and Parzefall, 2008; Coyle-Shapiro and Shore, 2007). It is our view that perceptions of injustice are a central part of the bullying experience, and that they can partially explain the negative outcomes of and reactions to workplace bullying. Further, bullying may lead bystanders to perceive organizational injustice, thereby generating negative outcomes beyond the perpetrator-target relationship. Similarly, exposure to bullying behaviours can lead to perceptions of psychological contract breach from both the targets’ and bystanders’ perspectives, placing perceived contract breach in a central role in the experience of bullying. Contract breach may in turn serve as an explanatory mechanism for many of the negative outcomes associated with bullying. Capturing perceptions of organizations’ care and support, POS may buffer against the negative experience of workplace bullying, and thus help the victims of workplace bullying in coping with the situation. By applying a SET-based lens to the analysis of the bullying experience and developing the above arguments further, we make a number of contributions to the bullying literature. First, by highlighting the importance of subjective perceptions of injustice in workplace bullying, we aim to reveal novel insights into the current debate regarding the

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definition of bullying and to provide an alternative to the controversial issue of ‘intent to harm’. Second, the justice perspective, and in particular the psychological contract perspective, allow us to explore how incidents of bullying may lead to the questioning of social norms governing social relationships at the workplace, thereby influencing negatively both targets’ and bystanders’ evaluations of their employment relationship on the whole. This helps us to advance the understanding of the experience of bullying and of the mechanisms through which bullying leads to negative consequences. Third, by informing the bullying literature with insights from the SET-based concepts, we are able to further strengthen the argument for appropriate and timely organizational responses in the case of bullying. Finally, by integrating the concept of workplace bullying with the key SET concepts, we aim to place bullying more firmly in the mainstream organizational behaviour literature and identify future directions for bullying research. We will start with an overview of the concept of bullying and the key debates surrounding the concept. This is followed by a brief description of SET before we move on to examine bullying through the lenses of justice, psychological contract breach, and POS.

Workplace bullying The concept of workplace bullying Workplace bullying can be defined as ‘harassing, offending, socially excluding someone or negatively affecting someone’s work tasks’ (Einarsen et al., 2003). Researchers agree that to be classified as bullying, this negative treatment must occur repeatedly and regularly over a period of time (Einarsen et al., 2003; Leymann, 1993; Salin, 2003a); thus, the systematic nature of the behaviour is stressed. Several researchers also stress the typically escalating and processual nature of bullying, whereby the target over time ends up in an inferior position (Einarsen et al., 2003; Leymann, 1993). Power disparities are emphasized in many definitions of bullying (Einarsen et al., 2003; Lutgen-Sandvik et al., 2007; Salin, 2003a), suggesting that it is not a normal conflict between parties of perceived equal strength. However, studies show that the perpetrator(s) may be superiors, colleagues or even subordinates (Zapf et al., 2003), indicating that such power imbalances often arise from other sources than organizational hierarchy (Einarsen et al., 2003). In contrast to many definitions of workplace aggression (Neuman and Baron, 1998), many researchers argue that bullying may be a result of both intentional harm-doing and unintentional reckless disregard while pursuing other goals (Einarsen et al., 2003). Workplace bullying began receiving systematic attention from European researchers in the 1990s (Einarsen et al., 1994; Leymann, 1993; Rayner, 1997), and interest in the topic quickly spread to other continents, for example Australia (McCarthy et al., 1996) and North America (Lutgen-Sandvik et al., 2007; Fox and Stallworth, 2005). From the very introduction of the concept, most bullying studies have had a strong empirical focus. The objectives of these studies have been to measure the prevalence of bullying (Einarsen and Skogstad, 1996; Hoel and Cooper, 2000; Lutgen-Sandvik et al., 2007), to identify the individual and organizational antecedents of bullying (Coyne et al., 2000; Einarsen et al., 1994) and to identify the individual and organizational consequences of bullying (Djurkovic et al., 2004; Einarsen and Mikkelsen, 2003; Fox and Stallworth, 2005; Hoel et al., 2003), often, however,

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in the absence of a clearly specified theoretical framework. In terms of consequences, studies have confirmed that bullying has negative effects on both employee well-being and health (Einarsen and Mikkelsen, 2003), and on employee attitudes and behaviours, such as commitment, job satisfaction, intention to leave, and prolonged sickness absenteeism (Djurkovic et al., 2004; Hoel and Cooper, 2000; Hoel et al., 2003). Furthermore, bullying has been shown to lead to similar, albeit weaker, negative effects on bystanders (Hansen et al., 2006; Hoel and Cooper, 2000; Lutgen-Sandvik et al., 2007). To the extent that theoretical frameworks have been used either explicitly or implicitly, European researchers have typically relied on a conflict framework (Zapf and Einarsen, 2005), a work environment framework (Einarsen et al., 1994; Hoel and Salin, 2003; Salin, 2003a), a gender framework (Lee, 2000; Salin, 2003b) or an industrial relations-framework (Hoel and Beale, 2006; Lewis and Rayner, 2003). North American researchers, on the other hand, have primarily framed bullying behaviours as a form of aggression in the workplace (Neuman and Baron, 2003), as a form of deviant or dysfunctional workplace behaviour (Robinson, 2008), as a form of counterproductive workplace behaviour (Fox and Spector, 2005), or as an expression of discrimination (Cortina [2008] on incivility). These aspects of bullying are all relevant and provide complementary ways of framing and understanding bullying behaviour, highlighting for instance its escalating nature, the role of deficiencies in the job design, and work organization, and the importance of gender and other underlying power structures in society (Hoel and Beale, 2006; Lee, 2000; Salin, 2003a; Zapf and Einarsen, 2005). The American research linking bullying to aggression and counterproductive workplace behaviours, on the other hand, highlights the importance of frustration and injustice as antecedents of bullying behaviour (Fox and Stallworth, 2005; Neuman and Baron, 2003).

Ongoing debates in bullying research What characterizes the above discussion is the strong emphasis on explaining the occurrence and identifying individual outcomes of bullying rather than understanding the bullying experience itself, thus leaving several gaps in the existing knowledge base. We will now move on to highlight a number of open questions in bullying research that we aim to address through our SET-based analysis. First, we would like to highlight the controversies that relate to the perceptual dimension of workplace bullying and the fact that the concept of bullying involves the subjective experience of the persons involved. There is no agreement regarding the threshold that negative behaviour must reach before being labelled bullying or the role of intent, with European researchers typically arguing that intent does not have to be present (Einarsen et al., 2003). The perpetrator’s actual intentions are indeed difficult to establish (Hoel et al., 1999), and cognitive biases and attributional errors may make targets more likely to attribute the negative behaviour to the perpetrator’s personality and explicit intentions to harm rather than environmental circumstances. Moreover, the line between ‘intent to harm’ and ‘reckless disregard’ may be difficult to draw when negative behaviours are used in an instrumental manner to achieve goals and efficiency (cf. Einarsen et al., 2003).

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With reference to the threshold, many employees face some negative behaviour in the workplace; for example, Fox and Stallworth (2005) reported that 97 percent of the employees in their sample had experienced one of the bullying behaviours included in their checklist. This finding shows that exposure to occasional ‘bullying behaviour’ and being an actual target of bullying are not necessarily the same thing. Definitions of bullying typically require the negative behaviour to be systematic. European research often uses the criteria that one of the negative acts must be experienced on at least a weekly basis (Einarsen et al., 2003; Hoel and Cooper, 2000), and in an American study LutgenSandvik et al. (2003) used a minimum of two acts on a weekly basis as their operational definition. Still, prevalence rates using behavioural checklists and criteria of one or two acts on a weekly basis are significantly higher than those reported when employees are asked to self-label as bullied or not (Lutgen-Sandvik et al., 2003; Nielsen et al., 2009; Salin, 2001). Moreover, using a latent cluster analysis, Notelaers et al., (2006) questioned the categorization of employees into merely bullied and non-bullied based on an operational classification method and showed that the picture was significantly more complex with several different additional clusters of employees in between these two extremes. Such an approach is highly useful for understanding patterns in large samples. However, for understanding individual perceptions of, and reactions to, workplace bullying, we believe that the concepts of (in)justice and psychological contract breach may be informative in terms of discussing bullying as a subjective experience that cannot be separated from employee expectations and that, at least partly, resides in the eye of the beholder. Second, while several studies have found strong correlations between bullying and negative outcomes in terms of employee health and well-being (Einarsen and Mikkelsen, 2003) and employee attitudes and behaviours, such as commitment, job satisfaction, and turnover (Hoel et al., 2003), few attempts have been made to explain them. Einarsen and Mikkelsen (2003) attempted to explain the relationship between bullying and health outcomes in terms of a trauma and a socio-biological perspective. Still, these perspectives provide limited insights into the effects on employee attitudes and behaviours, such as organizational commitment and satisfaction. Moreover, they fail to explain why bystanders, too, experience decreased job satisfaction and commitment when they witness bullying at their workplace (Hoel and Cooper, 2000). Agreeing with Robinson (2008), who has suggested that SET may provide a useful framework for investigating bullying in the context of exchange relationships, we believe that SET and, in particular, perceptions of injustice and psychological contract breach may emerge as explanatory frameworks for these findings, shedding light on how bullying affects organizationally relevant attitudes and behaviours of both the victims and those who witness bullying. Finally, we wish to draw attention to the lack of research on organizational action against bullying. While some researchers have described different approaches (Ferris, 2003; Salin, 2009) and others have presented recommendations for dealing with bullying (Resch and Schubinski, 1996; Richards and Daley, 2003), few studies have examined how organizational support mechanisms may influence perceptions and experiences of bullying and negative consequences associated with these. Recommendations for dealing with bullying typically focus on anti-bullying policies to prevent bullying, mediation in conflicts, and/or organizational development and redesigning jobs and the work organization (Resch and Schubinski, 1996; Richards and Daley 2003; Salin, 2008; Salin, 2009). However, we

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believe that the concept of perceived organizational support may provide additional insights into how an overall supportive organization and the resulting positive evaluation of the exchange relationship may buffer employees from the experience of bullying.

Social exchange theory and its key concepts In the organizational behaviour literature, SET offers one of the most influential mechanisms for understanding employee attitudes and behaviours (Coyle-Shapiro and Shore, 2007; Cropanzano and Mitchell, 2005). The concept of ‘social exchange’ refers to an unspecified exchange where one party needs to trust the other that the benefits received will be reciprocated and which typically occurs without any formal contract (Cropanzano and Mitchell, 2005). In short, employees repay a favourable work environment and conditions through better performance and other favourable attitudes and behaviours, but also adjust their attitudes and behaviours downward in response to treatment that they perceive as unfavourable (Robinson, 2008). In particular, the concepts of organizational justice, psychological contract, and perceived organizational support (POS) have proven valuable in capturing employees’ evaluations of the employment relationship quality and of the organization’s contributions to the exchange relationship (Aselage and Eisenberger, 2003; Coyle-Shapiro and Shore, 2007). Briefly, (in) justice refers to a perceptual cognition involving judgements regarding unwarranted actions by one party that harm or threaten other parties (Folger and Cropanzano, 1998). POS, in turn, captures employees’ perceptions concerning the degree to which their organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being (Aselage and Eisenberger, 2003). Psychological contract refers to beliefs regarding the terms and conditions of a reciprocal exchange agreement between the employee and the employer (Conway and Briner, 2005). Although the concepts of justice, psychological contract, and POS focus on the employee-employer exchange relationship (Coyle-Shapiro and Parzefall, 2008; Lavelle et al., 2007), a growing body of evidence suggests that co-workers and contextual factors play an important role in influencing employees’ perceptions of their social exchange relationships. For example, justice literature and researchers of idiosyncratic deals have drawn attention to intra-unit justice, justice climate, and third-party observations (Cropanzano et al., 2007a; Lavelle et al., 2007; Rousseau, 2005). Similarly, psychological contract researchers have suggested that contract perceptions may be influenced by how colleagues are treated. For example, in the context of downsizing, survivors may perceive a contract breach as a result of layoffs that include their colleagues (Edwards et al., 2003). Ho and Levesque (2005), in turn, have demonstrated that assessment of contract fulfilment is influenced by third parties. As argued by Robinson (2008), bullying is a dynamic process that unfolds in a myriad of exchange relationships with implications for the employment relationship as a whole. Targets’ and bystanders’ perceptions of bullying may thus be a part of, reflect or be influenced by social exchange relationships in the context of which bullying occurs, or lead employees to perceive lower-quality social exchange relationships at the workplace. We will now move on to analyse bullying through the lenses of justice, psychological contracts, and POS. We will address several areas that we consider to contribute significantly to bullying research and to the ongoing debates that we have identified earlier.

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Bullying through the lenses of SET-based concepts Bullying and organizational justice Organizational justice is typically examined as employees’ perceptions of fairness in terms of distributive (the fairness of resource distribution), procedural (the fairness of the processes by which outcomes are determined), and interactional justice (the fairness of interpersonal treatment) (Cohen-Charash and Spector, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2001). As bullying represents a form of maltreatment, which most typically occurs in the interpersonal relationship between the target and his/her colleague or supervisor, our focus is on interactional justice as a larger domain of interpersonal injustice. Interactional justice includes the dimensions of truthfulness, justification, respect, and propriety (Colquitt, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2001). Interactionally, fair treatment thus respects the other person, affirms his/her dignity and provides sufficient and relevant information, whereas unfair treatment is disrespectful, hostile and denies important information. In line with this, interactional injustice refers to derogatory judgments, disrespect, deception, and invasion of privacy. To date, the literature on injustice and bullying has principally viewed injustice as an antecedent of bullying (e.g Neuman and Baron, 2003), in line with the research on injustice-induced frustration and aggression in the workplace ( Beugré, 2005; Berkowitz, 1989, Skarlicki and Folger, 1997). This tradition has a particularly strong hold among American researchers studying related phenomena, such as abusive supervision (Tepper, 2007, Tepper et al., 2006; Aryee et al., 2007). While acknowledging the role of reciprocity in explaining engagement in some aggressive behaviours, our focus is on examining the experience and perceptions of workplace bullying. Specifically, we argue that injustice perceptions might be seen as a critical element in the experience of bullying; and that these injustice perceptions help in explaining the negative reactions among not only targets, but also among bystanders. Perceptions of injustice as a central element of bullying We argue that perceptions of injustice play a crucial role in the experience of workplace bullying, both in the case of vertical (downwards) and horizontal (peer) bullying. Empirical studies clearly show that only a minority of those subjected to pre-determined ‘bullying behaviours’ self-label as bullied (Salin, 2001). In other words, negative behaviours are perceived as bullying when the negative behaviour clashes with expectations and prevailing norms and is considered severe enough. Here, we also wish to highlight that in the field of incivility, Andersson and Pearson (1999) define uncivil behaviours as those that are in violation of workplace norms for mutual respect. We thus argue that similar conceptualisations may also be relevant in the field of workplace bullying. This discussion is also associated with the ongoing debate on the role of ‘intent to harm’ and threshold in bullying. Justice theory predicts that blame will be ascribed to an authority for an injustice when an individual believes that they would have been better off if a different outcome or procedure had occurred, if the authority could have behaved differently by taking other courses of action and that the authority should have behaved differently (Folger and Cropanzano, 1998, 2001). Similarly, we argue that the target’s appraisal of whether the perpetrator could and should have acted differently play a

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crucial role in the experience of bullying. The question regarding the role of intent to harm may thus be less relevant: it is the target’s perception that the perpetrator could and should have avoided the behaviour in question that determines whether (s)he thinks that bullying has taken place. Similarly, with reference to threshold, employee expectations, which translate into perceptions of justice or injustice, need to be acknowledged to a greater extent than has thus far been the case. Negative reactions to workplace bullying explained by perceptions of injustice Moving beyond the suggestion that injustice is a central element in the experience of bullying, we further argue that bullying itself may be a source of injustice perceptions and that it is precisely through injustice perceptions that bullying influences attitudes and behaviours. It is likely that exposure to bullying shatters employees’ perceptions of a (reasonably) just world in which things happen as they should, thereby leading to perceived injustice. For example, in an empirical study Tepper (2000) found that abusive supervision was associated with a range of negative outcomes, including anxiety and emotional exhaustion, and that these relationships were mediated by justice perceptions. In a similar vein, perceived injustice may serve to explain bystanders’ negative reactions to bullying. Several studies have confirmed the negative effects of bullying on bystanders, yet failed to provide an explanation for these relationships (Hansen et al., 2006; Hoel and Cooper, 2000; Lutgen-Sandvik et al., 2007). At the same time, researchers have recently drawn attention to how employees evaluate organizational justice based on their observations of what happens to others in the organization (Rousseau, 2005). Applied to bullying, employees who are aware of maltreatment that is taking place between their colleagues, or between a supervisor and a colleague, may perceive injustice. This in turn may lead to outcomes associated with injustice for those who are not directly influenced by or involved in bullying, as well as also negatively influencing the justice climate in the group.

Bullying and psychological contract breach Closely related to the perceptions of injustice are psychological contract breach perceptions. Essentially, the concept of a psychological contract captures the largely implicit beliefs about the promises and commitments made in the exchange relationship (Rousseau, 1995). These perceived promises and commitments bind the employee and the employer, represented by supervisors, managers and HR representatives, to a set of reciprocal obligations that allow the usually smooth unfolding of the exchange relationship (Rousseau, 1989). Unlike legal employment contracts, these deals are informal and often implicit and indirect, based on perceptions and interpretations of the other’s attitudes and behaviours. Thus, the psychological contract captures a highly subjective interpretation of the employment relationships and thus exists in the eye of the beholder. Psychological contract breach, or perceived failure to fulfil obligations, provides the main way of understanding how the psychological contract influences employee attitudes and behaviours (Conway and Briner, 2005). A wealth of independent studies and a recent meta-analysis have confirmed the negative consequences of a perceived breach, including lowered trust, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviour, and

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increased cynicism (Johnson and O’Leary-Kelly, 2003; Lo and Aryee, 2003; Zhao et al., 2007). In addition, psychological contract research has demonstrated that employee acceptance of the norm of reciprocity and other exchange-related dispositional factors relating to exchange ideology or values, might be important in explaining how individuals respond to the treatment they receive at the workplace (Eisenberger et al., 1987; CoyleShapiro and Neuman, 2004). Like justice, perceived psychological contract breach can advance understanding of the bullying experience. Specifically, we argue that incidents of both vertical and horizontal bullying may lead to perceptions of psychological contract breach. As the dynamics differ, we discuss these situations separately. Vertical bullying (downwards) as a breach As existing bullying research indicates, the perpetrator is oftentimes an immediate manager or supervisor (Zapf et al., 2003), who also often acts as the primary employer representative of the psychological contract (Coyle-Shapiro and Parzefall, 2008). It is highly likely that being subjected to abusive supervision falls short of employees’ expectations of fair treatment and violates the norm of reciprocity that governs the employee-employer exchange relationship, thus leading employees to evaluate their employer in the negative light. For example, Keashly (2001) found in her interview-study that the targets of interpersonal mistreatment had implicit and explicit expectations about how they felt that they should be treated and that the violation of such expectations typically was a strong determinant of the experience of being ‘abused’. Furthermore, some researchers have suggested that negative events in the exchange relationship may cause fluctuations in emotions and moods, and that these may accumulate and eventually lead employees to perceive contract breach (Conway and Briner, 2002; Parzefall and Coyle-Shaprio, 2006). Similarly, we argue that bullying in particular when it occurs on a systematic basis - violates the social norms governing the exchange relationship and can thus be perceived as contract breach. Perceived contract breach in turn influences negatively the targets’ attitudes and behaviours towards the organization on the whole. In other words, perceived contract breach presents the mechanism through which bullying generalizes into a negative evaluation of the employment relationship, and into subsequent downward adjustments in attitudes and behaviours. Highlighting the subjective nature of the bullying experience, the exchange-related dispositions suggested by the psychological contract research may influence whether the employee initially perceives a contract breach as a result of the bullying, and the extent to which breach perceptions finally induce employee reciprocity and are reflected in employee reactions to workplace bullying (Conway and Briner, 2005). In addition to employee dispositions, there might also be different norms across different occupations and countries in terms of what is perceived as ‘normal’ behaviour and what constitutes a breach of the psychological contract, making it even more difficult to find an objective ‘cut-off point’ for what is bullying and what is not. For example, the (luxury) restaurant kitchen is a sector where there has been a prevailing myth that abusive and abrasive supervision and blind subordination are necessary to produce high-quality, creative food (c.f. Hoel and Salin, 2003; Johns and Menzel, 1999).

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Non-interference in horizontal (peer) bullying as a breach Not only abusive treatment by superiors may be perceived as contract breach, so may not intervening in peer bullying. Keashly (2001) argued that in addition to having expectations of fair treatment, employees have expectations in terms of organizational responses. Even in countries without explicit anti-bullying legislation, the targets of bullying are likely to expect organizational representatives to take measures when mistreatment occurs, and expect dispute and grievance processes to be fair and efficient. When these measures are not in place or do not function adequately, the targets may feel that their organization has failed to fulfil its part of the deal with regard to the care and, thus, perceive contract breach. Furthermore, Ho (2005) and Ho and Levesque (2005) have highlighted the role of social relationships and social referents in influencing psychological contract evaluations. Similarly, Edwards et al. (2003) have argued that layoff notices to colleagues may be perceived as a contract breach by the surviving employees and thereby lead to downward adjustments in their attitudes and behaviours. Overall, the concept of psychological contracts has been assumed to provide the explanatory mechanism in numerous studies that have demonstrated negative effects of layoffs on surviving employees (Pugh et al., 2001; Virick et al., 2007). Consistent with these findings, we argue that not only the target of bullying may perceive employer failure to interfere with bullying as psychological contract breach, but also bystanders may perceive similar violations. In other words, non-interference in the case of bullying may be perceived as a psychological contract breach from the bystanders’ perspective, too, and negatively influence their evaluation about their employment relationship.

Bullying and perceived organizational support Perceived organizational support concerns the overall quality of the exchange relationship that takes place between the organization and the employee (Aselage and Eisenberger, 2003). When employees perceive that the organization is supportive and committed to them and helps employees to meet their socio-emotional and tangible needs, employees will reciprocate by helping the organization to achieve its goals (Eisenberger et al., 2004). In other words, employees evaluate and view their employment relationship in terms of the resources given to them by the organization. Specific antecedents of POS include fairness of treatment (Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002), support from organizational agents of different rank (Eisenberger et al., 2002), and human resource management practices that recognize the importance of human capital (Allen et al., 2003). POS has been found to have similar outcomes for justice and psychological contract perceptions. Empirical evidence indicates that POS positively influences, among others, organizational commitment (Eisenberger et al., 1990), in-role performance (Eisenberger et al., 1986, 1990), and organizational citizenship behaviour (Moorman et al., 1998; Wayne et al., 1997). Importantly, POS has also been found to reduce psychological strain in stressful work situations and contribute positively to employee wellbeing and health (Leather et al., 1998). For example, POS has been found to buffer the effects of occupational violence on its targets (Leather et al., 1998). In a similar vein, we argue that POS may play a moderating role in the relationship between bullying and negative outcomes.

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POS buffering employees from negative outcomes associated with bullying Lazarus and Folkman (1984) argue whether or not individuals have the resources to cope and respond to a situation will affect how stressful they perceive it to be. For example, research on stress and work engagement has demonstrated that job resources including organizational, managerial, and co-workers support may buffer the negative effects of various job demands and stressors on employee health, attitudes, and behaviours (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007; Karasek et al ., 1982). Similarly, POS may help employees to cope with bullying. Furthermore, in their recent study, Dulac et al., (2008) demonstrate that high levels of POS help mitigate the negative effects of psychological contract breach on employee negative emotional responses, thereby supporting the idea that POS helps employees to cope with negative experiences in their employment relationship. Although very limited attention has been paid to the potential of POS in the bullying process, there are studies suggesting that particular forms of support may also buffer employees from bullying. In their model of bullying, Einarsen et al. (2003) acknowledge that specific organizational action, for instance, tolerance, retribution, and policy enforcement, moderate the effects that the negative treatment has on the organization and on the target. Keashly (2001), in turn, found that organizational responses influenced the effects of emotional abuse and that a lack of organizational intervention was associated with decreased levels of commitment, loyalty, and effort. Similarly, Schat and Kelloway (2003) found that instrumental and informational support reduced the adverse consequences of workplace violence and aggression. Consequently, we argue that employees’ general levels of POS will enhance their perceived ability to cope with bullying. At the same time, we acknowledge that some may argue that bullying and POS cannot co-exist, since the experience of bullying itself would make employees feel that the organization does not care about their wellbeing, or since organizations that value and care for employees would not tolerate bullying, thus making it impossible. Although understanding this reasoning, in some cases the target may be able to see the ‘bully’ and the ‘organization’ as separate, particularly if the perpetrators are colleagues rather than managers, if the employee has a reason to believe that people higher up in the organization are not aware of the bullying, or if the support is associated with organizational representatives with more power than the perpetrator. However, should the organizational representatives allow bullying to continue even after becoming aware of it, this would certainly dramatically reduce POS.

Discussion and research agenda In this article we have examined and analysed workplace bullying from a social exchange perspective. We believe our analysis has a number of implications for the bullying literature and points out interesting research directions that we discuss below. First, we have argued that the concept of injustice and psychological contract advance our understanding of the subjective and perceptional element in the experience of bullying. More precisely, we have argued that injustice is a central element in the subjective experience of bullying. In other words, we propose the perception that the perpetrator could and should have acted differently as an alternative to ‘intent to harm’, the role of

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which has been heavily debated when defining bullying. The relation between injustice perceptions and the experience of bullying thus warrants further empirical investigation diverting from the common research designs that place injustice as an independent variable leading to bullying as a reciprocal response (cf. Colquitt et al., 2001). Rather, we encourage researchers to complement this strand of research by examining the role of perceived injustice in the bullying experience itself. The concept of psychological contract breach in turn draws our attention to the subjectivity involved in feelings of being bullied and highlights the importance of employee expectations for determining whether a certain act is defined as bullying. Emphasising the role of expectations also sensitise us to the fact that different behaviours may be perceived as bullying in different organizational contexts, occupations, and countries, and that the threshold for what is labelled bullying may differ, making it difficult to agree on an ‘objective’ cut-off point. For example, Beale and Hoel (in press) have recently used the national industrial relations environment to explain national differences in bullying behaviours. Similarly, national culture may be highly important for employee perceptions of when a manager or colleague could and should have acted differently. For example, what is perceived as ‘unacceptable bullying’ in countries characterized by a high degree of femininity (cf. Hofstede, 1984), such as the Scandinavian countries, may be perceived as managerial prerogative in a country characterized by a higher degree of masculinity, such as the US. At the same time, we wish to emphasize that we do not see bullying as completely in the eye of the beholder. To classify something as bullying, we believe that this behaviour must involve certain behaviours that would also be perceived as negative by the standards of a reasonable person. However, we argue that targets typically label these events as bullying only if they also clash with his or her expectations of acceptable treatment. Consequently, using only behavioural checklists to measure bullying without simultaneously controlling for the extent to which the behaviour contradicts the general employment-related expectations, and the degree to which the target feels able to defend him or herself, may produce descriptive findings with relatively low meaning. If truly aiming to understand the phenomenon of bullying, bullying incidents need to be placed in a particular context. We thus strongly recommend future studies to acknowledge the personalized experience. In practice, this could include systematically combining behavioural checklists with target self-labelling in the measurement of bullying. More use of qualitative studies (e.g. interviewees of targets) adhering to strict ethical standards could provide a useful perspective into the dynamics of the bullying experience and help explore it from the psychological contract breach and justice perspectives. Second, we have argued that the concepts of justice and psychological contract breach provide insights into the mechanism how bullying affects the perceptions of targets and bystanders. They help us explain why even some of the ‘milder’ forms of bullying can lead to negative consequences in terms of organizationally relevant employee attitudes and behaviours, such as job satisfaction, commitment, and intention to stay. We do not, however, treat these negative outcomes of bullying as merely deliberate retaliation or negative reciprocal actions (for revenge and retaliation literature see Skarlicki and Folger, 1997; Tripp et al., 2007). Rather, we argue that violations of reciprocity as a norm governing the social relationships and of belief in a ‘just world’ can

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explain why incidents of bullying generate into negative evaluations of the employment relationship on the whole (and not only evaluations of the relationship with the penetrator). Hence, we recommend future research to empirically test whether injustice and psychological contract breach perceptions play a mediating role in the relationship between bullying and employees’ attitudes and behaviours. Similarly, the perceptions of injustice and breach also help explain why not only employees bullied by superiors but also those bullied by peers may come to hold highly negative attitudes towards the organization as a whole. If the employer is not interfering when bullying occurs, breach and injustice perceptions, and thereby downward adjustments in attitudes and behaviours, are likely. Importantly, we also believe that both injustice and psychological contract breach help future studies to examine the impact of witnessing workplace bullying. Furthermore, if bullying occurs on a systematic basis, the perceptions of injustice and breach that generalize among the targets and bystanders may contribute to the development of injustice climate or unethical social/meta-psychological contract (cf. Cropanzano et al., 2007b; Lavelle et al., 2007). These may set into motion further cycles of negative behaviours. Thus, the spillover of negative bullying outcomes beyond the perpetratortarget relationship, and how such a spillover contributes to a general injustice climate, is proposed as an avenue for further research. Third, we have argued that POS may buffer against the negative effects of bullying on both targets and bystanders and help them to better cope with the situation. Again, we suggest that this proposed relationship should be empirically tested. Today, many countries are adopting anti-bullying legislation, requiring employers to take action in cases of bullying and other inappropriate treatment. However, we emphasize that doing only what the law explicitly requires does not necessarily bring about the desired effects; in fact, studies have shown that employees clearly distinguish between favourable treatment that is discretionary and favourable treatment brought on by external constraints and regulation (Eisenberger et al., 1997). This shows that organizations need to go beyond, and be perceived to go beyond, mere anti-bullying regulations in order for employees to gain the added value resulting from POS. Furthermore, recent work of trust repair has indicated that putting in place structures that are supposed to prevent negative events from occurring may not be enough. Rather, trust repair requires a broader range of strategies, including attempts to restore the equilibrium in social norms (Dirks et al., 2008). While we believe that our SET-approach to bullying has a number of strengths, we also acknowledge its limitations and the need to incorporate alternative views to gain a full understanding of the nature of bullying experience. For example, we encourage future studies to elaborate on the role of attribution in the bullying experience. Attribution theory (Weiner, 1986) might help us uncover in more depth the psychological processes that may take place when an individual is exposed to such negative events as bullying, either as a target or as a bystander. How targets and bystanders assign blame may affect both how they label certain acts and how they react to them, and whether they perceive them as a psychological contract breach. Similarly, the role of emotions and such behaviours as denial and ego-defensive behaviour in the experience of bullying need to be better understood to fully capture the complexity of bullying experience and perceptions.

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Practical implications Our discussion draws attention to the negative consequences of bullying that are not limited to the perpetrator-target relationship but can generalize into injustice and psychological contract breach perceptions, thereby influencing both targets’ and bystanders’ organizationally relevant attitudes and behaviours. It is therefore of high importance for organizations to react to the incidents of bullying immediately, to prevent them from escalating into phenomenon that is not only ethically wrong but also costly in terms of its negative effects on employees’ attitudes and behaviour. Furthermore, organizational support and employers’ engagement in high-quality social exchange relationships may act as a buffer against bullying and minimize its costly effects. We thus encourage managers to take a proactive stand in terms of caring for employees, and intervening in questionable behaviours promptly, whether these occur between superiors and employees, or among peers. Furthermore, it is important to note that targets of bullying typically start by utilizing different constructive, problem-solving conflict management techniques before resorting to any more radical responses, such as exiting the organization (Niedl, 1995; Zapf and Gross, 2001). This provides organizations with a window of opportunity to take action and restore feelings of justice even if bullying has occurred. We therefore recommend organizations to be particularly sensitive to justice issues in cases of bullying, and to be aware of the risk of psychological contract breach perceptions. Like the literature on layoffs and psychological contract breach suggests, perceptions of just treatment and processes can make a significant difference to employee judgement of the situation, even when the final outcome remains unchanged (Cropanzano et al., 2007b).

Conclusion By examining workplace bullying through the lenses of the key SET concepts, we have shed light into the under-theorized perceptions of and reactions to bullying, and advanced understanding of the mechanisms through which bullying results in negative outcomes and highlighted the importance of organizational support as a buffer. In so doing, we hope to have placed bullying more firmly in the mainstream organizational behaviour literature and pointed out novel directions for future studies on this negative but unfortunately common phenomenon. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Editor-in-Chief Professor Stephen Deery and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and feedback, as well as Professor Jacqueline CoyleShapiro and Professor Jeff Hearn for commenting on earlier versions of the article.

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Marjo-Riitta Parzefall (PhD) is Assistant Professor at the European Business School, Wiesbaden, Germany. Her current research interests include social exchange theory based concepts, innovation and innovativeness. Her previous work has appeared in both Finnish and international journals, including International Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Personnel Review, and Creativity and Innovation Management. [Email: [email protected]] Denise M Salin (PhD) is Lecturer in Management and Organization at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland, and Adjunct Professor of Workplace Psychology at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research interests include the dark side of organizational behaviour, employee relations and employee well-being, and gender and management. Her previous work has been in published in, among other journals, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Personnel Review, Gender Work and Organization, and Human Relations. [Email: [email protected]]