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.