A qualitative study on how Swedish organizations deal with workplace bullying

Abstract

The ways and means with which organizations handle workplace bullying are not well-known, and research on this topic is very limited. Therefore, this study attempts to provide insights into this issue. Sweden, being the country where workplace-bullying research was born and the first anti-workplace-bullying law was enacted, would possibly provide the best (and the worst) practices to deal with it, as well. For this study, experienced human resources managers from 45 Swedish organizations with more than thousand employees were recruited via Linked-in business networking tool. Personal interviews with the managers were transcribed verbatim. Hermeneutical-phenomenological analysis of the transcripts by two researchers who analyzed the data independently yielded four major themes: (1) absence of specific policies and procedures against workplace bullying, (2) fuzzy portrayal of bullying, (3) mediation as the most frequently used method of intervention, and (4) rarity of bullying at Swedish organizations. The findings were discussed.

Keywords::

• bullying
• mobbing
• Sweden
• psychological victimization at work
• workplace bullying

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The Swedish Institute funded this research. The data in the manuscript was not previously presented at any meetings. No other paper based on the present data is under review in any other journal.