Relationships Between Moral Disengagement, Work Characteristics and Workplace Harassment

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One of the earliest comprehensive discussions specifically focusing on workplace harassment was by Carroll Brodsky (1976) in his book titled The Harassed Worker. In The Harassed Worker, Brodsky described a number of people and situations drawn from claims filed with the California Workers' Compensation Appeals Board and the Nevada Industrial Commission. The claims discussed by Brodsky involved the questionable treatment of one employee by another and were clear indicators that various forms of harassment were common problems. After 1976, it seems that little attention was paid to harassment until the 1990s when studies of bullying at work (Einarsen, Raknes, & Matthiesen, 1994) and mobbing (Leymann, 1990) were published by several European researchers. During these past two decades several terms have been used interchangeably to refer to, arguably, the same phenomenon and there is recognition by a number of researchers that the absence of an agreed upon term and definition is problematic for the development of knowledge in this area (see Crawshaw, 2009 and Einarsen, 2000 for a list of terms used to describe the same or conceptually similar constructs). For the purposes of clarity and consistency in this report, the term ‘workplace harassment’ (or simply ‘harassment’) is used and is liberally defined as problematic interpersonal workplace interactions in which one or more employees feel themselves to have been victimized by one or more other employees. Moreover, the perspective from which the harassment was experienced or studied is not differentiated in this report, rather research on and experiences of harassment from all available perspectives has been considered for the purpose of achieving a broad exploration of the mechanism(s) that might connect features of the employees’ work environments to workplace harassment. An idea of the extent of the problem

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