Intensity, intent, and ambiguity: Appraisals of workplace ostracism and coping responses.

Using both correlational and experimental designs across four studies (N = 1251 working individuals), the current project aimed to contribute to the understanding of workplace ostracism by studying two research questions. First, we tested whether the subjective experience of targets reflects the current theorizing of ostracism. Second, drawing from the transactional theory of stress and coping, we investigated whether this subjective experience impacts targets' coping responses. Findings based on exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported the current theorizing of workplace ostracism such that perceived intensity, intent, and ambiguity were reflected in how targets appraised being ostracized at work. The appraisals were also related to coping responses. Perceived intensity predicted more approach-oriented (e.g., confrontation) and less avoidance-oriented coping responses (e.g., minimization). While attributions of intent also predicted some coping responses (e.g., instrumental support seeking), the explanatory power of perceived ambiguity was lower than the other two appraisals. Although these researcher-defined dimensions may be reflective of targets' experience, we propose that predictions made based on these dimensions need further refinement. The theoretical and practical significance of these findings are discussed in relation to how workplace ostracism is typically studied in the literature.

Putting workplace bullying in context: The role of high-involvement work practices in the relationship between job demands, job resources, and bullying exposure.

Previous research has demonstrated the crucial association between employee stressors and workplace bullying. In this article, we argue that a nurturing organizational context will protect employees from exposure to workplace bullying and will interact with individual demands and resources known to have effect on exposure to bullying in the workplace. In specific, we look at high-involvement work practices (HIWPs)-which include participation, information-sharing, competence development, and rewards. Multilevel analyses on the data from 28,923 Belgian employees from 144 organizations show that organization-level HIWPs are negatively associated with bullying exposure. Moreover, HIWPs interact with individually experienced job demands and resources, by decreasing the association between employee work pressure and bullying and by somewhat compensating for the lack of experienced social support from colleagues at work. HIWPs did not moderate the relationship between employee job insecurity and bullying and social support from the supervisor and bullying. These findings highlight the important role HIWPs can play in protecting employees from workplace bullying, while also suggesting the difficulty of compensating for certain individual risk factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Start Small, not Random: Why does Justifying your Time-Lag Matter?

Repeated measurement designs have been growing in popularity in the fields of Organizational Behavior and Work and Organizational Psychology. This brings up questions regarding the appropriateness of time-lag choices and validity of justification used to make time-lag decisions in the current literature. We start by explaining how time-lag choices are typically made and explain issues associated with these approaches. Next, we provide some insights into how an optimal time-lag decision should be made and the importance of time-sensitive theory building in helping guide these decisions. Finally, we end with some brief suggestions as to how authors can move forward by urging them to explicitly address temporal dynamics in their research, and by advocating for descriptive studies with short time-lags, which are needed to uncover how the changes happen over time.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil: Theorizing network silence around sexual harassment.

#MeToo has inspired the voices of millions of people (mostly women) to speak up about sexual harassment at work. The high-profile cases that reignited this movement have revealed that sexual harassment is and has been shrouded in silence, sometimes for decades. In the face of sexual harassment, managers, witnesses and targets often remain silent, wittingly or unwittingly protecting perpetrators and allowing harassment to persist. In this integrated conceptual review, we introduce the concept of network silence around sexual harassment, and theorize that social network compositions and belief systems can promote network silence. Specifically, network composition (harasser and male centrality) and belief systems (harassment myths and valorizing masculinity) combine to instill network silence around sexual harassment. Moreover, such belief systems elevate harassers and men to central positions within networks, who in turn may promote problematic belief systems, creating a mutually reinforcing dynamic. We theorize that network silence contributes to the persistence of sexual harassment due to the lack of consequences for perpetrators and support for victims, which further reinforces silence. Collectively, this process generates a culture of sexual harassment. We identify ways that organizations can employ an understanding of social networks to intervene in the social forces that give rise to silence surrounding sexual harassment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Longitudinal Association Between Poor Sleep Quality and Cyberbullying, Mediated by Anger.

Adolescents tend to go to bed later and sleep less as they grow older, although their need for sleep stays the same throughout adolescence. Poor sleep has negative consequences on personal and interpersonal functioning, including increased aggressive tendencies. With adolescents' social life increasingly including interactions via digital media, these interactions may also become more aggressive when adolescents' sleep problems increase. One of the ways in which online aggression may be enacted is through cyberbullying. Although previous research has examined the role of sleep disruptions in offline bullying, the role of sleep in cyberbullying has not yet been addressed. Therefore, this study examines the longitudinal effect of poor sleep quality on later cyberbullying behavior. Thirteen- to fourteen-year-old adolescents completed self-report measures on sleep quality, anger, cyberbullying perpetration, and frequency of digital media use. Because one of the pathways through which sleep is proposed to be linked to aggression is an affective pathway, namely via angry affect, a mediation model of poor sleep quality predicting cyberbullying via feelings of anger was tested. Results from structural equation modeling and a bootstrap test indicated that poor sleep quality was indeed indirectly associated with later cyberbullying behavior through heightened feelings of anger, even when taking the effects of the use of digital media and previous cyberbullying behavior into account. This finding provides support for the proposed affective pathway linking sleep problems to aggression. As sleep problems and anger seem to play a predicting role in cyberbullying behavior, suggestions for cyberbullying intervention and prevention strategies are formulated.

Patterns of cybervictimization and emotion regulation in adolescents and adults.

Research on cyberbullying has boomed in the past two decades. Findings from studies among adolescents suggest that they can be classified into distinct groups based on their cyberbullying experience, and that cyberbullying seems to be related to poor emotion regulation. So far, only a few studies have examined cyberbullying among adult workers and it is unclear whether cyberbullying develops similarly in that population. Therefore, in this study cyberbullying victimization was assessed in adolescents and adult workers simultaneously to address three aims: (1) to explore which groups can be distinguished based on their cyberbullying experience; (2) to analyze the associations of group membership with the way people regulate their emotions; and (3) to examine whether the results are comparable in adolescents and adults. Latent class analysis was used to analyze data from 1,426 employees and 1,715 adolescents in the first year of secondary education (12-13 years old). In each population, three profiles differing in their patterns of cybervictimization were identified: no cybervictimization (80%), work-related cybervictimization (18%), and pervasive cybervictimization (3%) for adults, and no cybervictimization (68%), similar-to-offline cybervictimization (27%), and pervasive cybervictimization (4%) for adolescents. Furthermore, these profiles differed in their use of emotion regulation strategies, with pervasive cyber-victims suppressing their emotions significantly more than other groups. Future research is needed to clarify the role of emotion regulation in cyberbullying as an antecedent or consequence of victimization.