posted on 2016-04-06, 10:28authored bySamuel Farley, Iain CoyneIain Coyne, Christine A. Sprigg, Carolyn Axtell, Ganesh Subramanian
Objectives: Workplace bullying is an occupational hazard for trainee doctors. However little is
known about their experiences of cyberbullying at work. This study examines the impact of
cyberbullying among trainee doctors, and how attributions of blame for cyberbullying
influenced individual and work‐related outcomes.
Methods: Doctors more than six months into their training were asked to complete an online
survey that included measures of cyberbullying, blame attribution, negative emotion, job
satisfaction, interactional justice and mental strain. In total, 158 trainee doctors (104 females,
54 males) completed the survey.
Results: Overall, 71 (45%) respondents experienced at least one act of cyberbullying.
Cyberbullying adversely impacted on job satisfaction (β=‐0.19; P<.05) and mental strain
(β=0.22; P<.001), although attributions of blame for the cyberbullying influenced its impact
and the mediation path. Negative emotion mediated the relationship between self‐blame for
a cyberbullying act and mental strain; whereas interactional injustice mediated the
association between blaming the perpetrator and job dissatisfaction.
Conclusions: Cyberbullying acts were experienced by nearly half of the sample during their
training and were found to significantly relate to ill‐health and job dissatisfaction. The
deleterious impact of cyberbullying can be addressed through both workplace policies and
training for trainee doctors and other experienced medical professionals.
History
School
Business and Economics
Department
Business
Published in
Medical Education
Volume
49
Issue
4
Pages
436 - 443
Citation
FARLEY, S. ... et al, 2015. Exploring the impact of workplace cyberbullying on trainee doctors. Medical Education, 49 (4), pp.436-443
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2014-11-24
Publication date
2015-03-20
Copyright date
2015
Notes
This is the peer reviewed version of the article, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.12666. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.