Organisational readiness for workplace bullying interventions: Conceptualisation and measurement

Purpose

Workplace bullying is a severe psychosocial stressor with detrimental effects on individual well-being. This has led calls for more evidence on effective interventions to address workplace bullying. While some evidence exists on intervention effectiveness, systematic reviews do not yet show compelling evidence of intervention success. Currently lacking is an understanding of the context–intervention fit of bullying interventions and whether organisations are ready to embrace them. This paper aims to conceptualise and assess organisational readiness for a bullying intervention as a way of understanding context-intervention fit.

Design/methodology/approach

Across several studies, combining qualitative and quantitative data analysis, using subject-matter experts (n = 30) and working samples (n = 171 and 9,915), this paper conceptualises readiness for workplace bullying interventions, develops a pre-intervention audit tool to assess readiness and validates the tool on two different public sector samples.

Findings

Findings support a two-factor conceptualisation of readiness comprising five components of structural readiness (process and policy, leadership, culture, climate and well-being, support and resources) and four components of psychological readiness (trust, change efficacy, fairness and psychosocial safety). Significant positive correlations emerge between readiness ratings and the extent employees perceive an intervention addressing bullying will be successful.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to conceptualise readiness for a workplace bullying intervention and develop an audit tool to assess structural and psychological readiness.