“Is anti-bullying a core issue in the workplace?”;
This review would breakdown each point down and would show whether anti-bullying is the core issue to the organisations or the solution or whether there is more to bullying in the work place. Points mention in this review would be what is the rationale for the article? What does the author do? The outcome of the research taken and lastly the strengths and limitations of the article. This article would basically breakdown how bullying in the workplace affects the employees and there is a trait of distrust, the research shown in this article shows that employees are not happy with what the HR practitioners responses are to the anti-bullying policy, as they feel belittled and they voices are not heard but the managers voices are; “trust between employee, manager and HR practitioners is essential for the successful resolution of bullying claims, yet this study suggests multiple directions of distrust.”
The purpose of this article is to show the distrust between employees, HR and managers when handling bullying in the workplace this is quoted in the article “in this article, we examine the dynamics of trust in the triadic relationship between HR, employees and managers when dealing with allegations of workplace bullying”.
The core issue being addressed in this article is the implementation of anti-bullying policy in an organisation and how the anti-bullying policy isn’t working efficiently as it’s supposed to be as employees are still getting bullied “despite anti-bullying HRM policies in over 75% of UK organisations (CMI, 2008), the overall prevalence of bullying is apparently not decreasing (Rayner, 2009)” this shows how inefficient this policy is and this is all because the employees don’t trust their HRM’s and HRP’s.
The author of this article thinks that this would interest the people as most people are employed and they might be going through the same thing in their work place and wouldn’t be able to speak up as they have a fear of them getting fired; “bullying is an issue present in most organisations with significant consequences” this shows that bullying is still an issue in this present day and the policy isn’t doing what its meant to be doing. Bullying can take place in different ways it might not necessarily be the management picking on the employees but they might just take away a benefit from them that’s meant to be included with contract, for example some employees having 48 days of holiday and others having 21 days; this is also can be a discrimination and breaking the rules of Employment Act 2002, which clearly states that employees have the right to be treated equally. This article basically based on employees being bullied in the workplace and this could be a problem as some might feel very unhappy at their workplace; “bullying is associated with a range of psychosocial effects (Hogh et al., 2011)” this shows that employees are affected by this and also shows that the legislation of the anti-bullying policy isn’t carrying out its purpose as it’s supposed to be.
The author uses semi structured interviews to answer the questions to the issues that has been raised which is bullying in the workplace and how the anti-bullying policy doesn’t help the employees whatsoever. These interviews were done with different job roles at different levels in an organisation from the human resources advisors to the director as they would have more involvement to the bullying going on in the work place and see what they can do to prevent such things happening. The author uses this method to show different prospective on how their organisation handles bullying and if anti-bullying policy works for them as he asked them various questions “for example, interviewees were asked to describe what they considered bullying to be describe cases that they considered had optimal outcomes or been particularly challenging”.
This method is appropriate as the author was able to analyse the results and also see how the problem came about and how to solve it; “in extreme cases, HRP’s described this as ‘being burnt’. We contend that trust theory can help to understand this apparently extreme reaction.” This shows that the method would be helpful to the research as it states in the discussion between the interviewee and the HR management that the theory can help identify the problem and also ways that the problem can be solved. The strengths of the method would be that the interviewee asked various HRM’s and HRP’s from different organisations, which allowed the data/result to be impartial because they got different opinion on the questions asked, because of they asked HRM’s and HRP’s in the same organisation the results would be bias and there wouldn’t be any way for the policy to improve. The limitation of the method would be that even though they carried out the interviews with external people it was still limited to more females than male, it should have been a range of both sex and also a range of different ethnicities this would have made the research much better.
The contribution that this article brings is that it allows the HRP’s and HRM’s voice their opinion on the policy and this would help the research as the interviewee would be able to put the data gathered together as see what went well and what didn’t and see what they could do to make it better. The conclusions that were drawn is that the HRP-managers-employee triad isn’t necessarily working as the HRP’s have favoured the management as this would have a negative assumption on the employees as they would want their voice to be heard but they don’t get any response from the HRP’S, whereas the managers voices are always heard this would have an impact in the employees as they wouldn’t be able to trust the managers talk less of the HRP’s. All issues were addressed but in the conclusions it says “our finding suggest that it may not be policy that is at fault” this might be another issue that needs to be resolved because this basically states that the anti-bullying policy is technically the root to the distrust between the HR, employees and managers, it might be something totally different, meaning more research needs to go into this and in depth research and anti-bullying policy might just be one the implementations or might not be one at all.
The strength of this article would be that the interviews that were set out made a huge impact as they got to see different sides on how different organisations deal with their anti-bullying policy and to see if it was efficient or not and as this was primary data that was found it would be more reliable because it would be first hand research; this is what the author achieve as this helped see what the problem was and what can help the problem to be solved. The limitations of this article would be when it says that the anti-bullying policy might not be a fault, this could have an impact on the research found as they would have to look into depth and see what exactly the fault of bullying in the work place is. Anti-bullying might be part of the fault but might also be a false justification as organisations might not want to say the real truth because the fear of their reputation might be on the line and could affect their organisation in the long run, as people might not want to work there because they bully their employees (they voices wouldn’t be heard). The article wasn’t a bias article because the discussion between the HRM’s/HRP’s with the interviewee was fair as they knew what was being discussed and also knew the implementations of the matter that was at hand.