Filling the Space: A Framework for Coordinated Global Actions To Diminish Academic Bullying.

Academic bullying is a serious issue that affects all disciplines and people of all levels of experience. To create a truly safe, productive, and vibrant environment in academia requires coordinated and collaborative input as well as the action of a variety of stakeholders, including scholarly communities, funding agencies, and institutions. In this Viewpoint, we focus on a framework of integrated responding, in which stakeholders as responsible and response-able parties could proactively collaborate and coordinate to reduce the incidence and consequences of academic bullying while at the same time building constructive academic cultures. The outcome of such a framework would be to create novel entities (e.g. centre of excellence in academic ethics and civility) and actions (e.g. incorporating bullying records into institutional rankings) that accelerate successful responses to academic bullying.

When faculty are bullied: the unacceptable costs of doing our job and what universities can and should do.

Faculty get bullied for their work by multiple audiences. Faculty bullying is thus workplace bullying. As employers of faculty, universities must ensure faculty workspaces are safe by taking actions to secure these spaces and to support and defend faculty, specifically, and academic freedom and knowledge creation and promotion, generally. Suggestions for responding and preventing hostile work environments are provided.

Workplace bullying: the case of teen workers.

Work is an important yet understudied life domain for adolescents that has important implications for their development and well-being. Work relationships, particularly with supervisors and coworkers, are critical influences on teens. To the extent these relationships are negative, as evidenced in workplace bullying, the impact on teens can be wide-ranging and enduring. In this article, research on workplace bullying and its effects is briefly summarized and used as a context for exploring adolescent experiences with bullying on the job, both in terms of their vulnerability to exposure and unique impacts. Implications of these findings for health professionals in the assessment and treatment of teens exposed to workplace bullying are discussed.

COVID-19 pandemic may fuel academic bullying.

The COVID-19 pandemic may exacerbate factors influencing abusive workplace behaviors in general such as psychological health, economic and social inequities. This is true in academic and research environments where we can expect to see an increase in the incidence of academic bullying. Research and experience shows that academic bullying will have significant and enduring negative effects on scientific integrity and academic health. In this perspective piece we will explore the potential facilitative influence of COVID-19 and specifically responses to it, on bullying behaviors in academic and research environments.

Effects of high-involvement work systems on employee satisfaction and service costs in veterans healthcare.

Two strong imperatives for healthcare managers are reducing costs of service and attracting and retaining highly dedicated and competent patient care and support employees. Is there a trade-off or are there organizational practices that can further both objectives at the same time? High-involvement work systems (HIWS) represent a holistic work design that includes interrelated core features such as involvement, empowerment, development, trust, openness, teamwork, and performance-based rewards. HIWS have been linked to higher productivity, quality, employee and customer satisfaction, and market and financial performance in Fortune 1000 firms. Apparently, few prior studies have looked at the impacts of this holistic design within the healthcare sector. This research found that HIWS were associated with both greater employee satisfaction and lower patient service costs in 146 Veterans Health Administration centers, indicating that such practices pay off in both humanistic and financial terms. This suggests that managers implementing HIWS will incur real expenses that are likely to be more than offset by more satisfied employees, less organizational turmoil, and lower service delivery costs, which, in this study, amounted to over $1.2 million in savings for an average VHA facility.