

High levels of anxiety can impair individual task performance ( Eysenck et al., 2007) and can explain the negative consequences of workplace bullying ( Rodriguez-Munoz et al., 2015 Duru et al., 2018). Anxiety is the formation of complex emotional responses such as internal unrest and physiological discomfort ( Laws and Bhatt, 2005). This leads to considerable cost to an organization in a financial sense and also has a destructive effect on the organization’s growth.Įxisting studies mostly draw on social psychology in analyzing the impacts of bullying on the victim. Second, workplace bullying has a strong negative outcome in victims’ low work efficiency and quality. Such damage affects physical and mental health and an employee’s family life ( Finstad et al., 2019). First, employees may suffer from repeated negative behaviors from superiors, colleagues, or subordinates over a long period, causing psychological pressure and emotional damage.

The negative consequences of workplace bullying may be viewed from different perspectives ( Magee et al., 2017). Chinese employees, however, are more likely to view their experience as typical or normal, given a culture of power orientation and obedience that is unique to Confucianism ( Guo et al., 2015 Mengyun et al., 2018). Many employees are subjected to bullying of some kind at some point in their career. Since its recognition as an issue in the workplace in the mid-1980s, workplace bullying has come to be seen as an increasingly serious example of workplace violence ( Einarsen and Nielsen, 2015). Any attempt at effective complaint or defense is likely to be met with silence or attack, resulting in serious adverse consequences for the victim’s mood. It is a negative interpersonal behavior formed on the basis of a formal or informal power imbalance ( Ahmad, 2018). As interpersonal conflict, workplace bullying represents a comprehensive behavior in the form of offense and insult. Workplace bullying leads individuals to doubt their concept of their own self and worth in the face of a dangerous environment ( Attell et al., 2017), inducing psychological and physical discomfort or damage. It can include verbal criticism or direct personal attacks with the purpose of intentionally humiliating or belittling others ( Adams and Bray, 1992).
#Bullying on the job series#
Workplace bullying is a persistent series of mistreatments of others in the workplace. Analysis verified that trait anxiety is the decisive perspective for choosing between “passive resistance” and “swallowing the insult.” This provides theoretical and practical contributions to psychology and organizational behavior research. Employee-supervisor pairs from 20 organizations and institutions from Tianjin, Jiangsu, and Hainan participated in a two-point longitudinal survey in 2019, 82.67% effective. A moderated mediation model is presented for the relationship between workplace bullying and job performance using key variables of state anxiety and trait anxiety. Individuals may respond to bullying and anxiety through “passive resistance” or by “swallowing the insult.” However, under what circumstances do individuals choose between these options? This paper summarizes the mechanisms of state anxiety and trait anxiety and uses cognitive balance theory to measure loss of self-control and the strategic choices. However, anxiety research does not carefully distinguish between state anxiety and trait anxiety, and so the impact of anxiety in general has been seen as complex and contradictory. Anxiety can explain the effects of workplace bullying: individuals may seek to deal with their anxiety by applying specific behaviors. 2School of Management, Hainan University, Haikou, ChinaĪnxiety arising from workplace bullying is a key concern for job performance.1School of Finance and Economics, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China.Mengyun Wu 1, Qi He 1, Muhammad Imran 1* and Jingtao Fu 2
