TY - JOUR
T1 - Bullying and ill-treatment: insights from an Irish public sector workplace
AU - Hodgins, Margaret
AU - Lewis, Duncan
AU - Pursell, Lisa
AU - Hogan, Victoria
AU - MacCurtain, Sarah
AU - Mannix-McNamara, Patricia
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - IMPACT: The authors examine the experiences of public sector workers in Ireland who had either been ill-treated or who worked to prevent ill-treatment and bullying in their organization. The authors demonstrate the limitations of providing a policy in the absence of understanding the need for implementation, and the need to understand how organizational culture is relevant to both the enactment and the amelioration of ill-treatment in the workplace. Training managers to be proactive and to be mindful of the need to ensure accountability is important, as well as communicating what is unacceptable in terms of behaviour and management style. ABSTRACT This paper explores the experiences of workers in a public sector organization in respect of workplace ill-treatment. The paper is based on 11 interviews which were part of the Irish Workplace Behaviour Study (2018). Workplace ill-treatment, and in particular workplace bullying, has been found to be more prevalent in public sector workplaces. Irish public sector workplaces have taken the brunt of severe austerity measures imposed by successive governments as part of the country’s fiscal retrenchment policies between 2008 and 2016. The findings reported in this paper support Salin’s (2003) model of ‘Enabling, motivating, and precipitating structures’, and are considered in the light of psychological contract breach in the context of New Public Management (NPM).
AB - IMPACT: The authors examine the experiences of public sector workers in Ireland who had either been ill-treated or who worked to prevent ill-treatment and bullying in their organization. The authors demonstrate the limitations of providing a policy in the absence of understanding the need for implementation, and the need to understand how organizational culture is relevant to both the enactment and the amelioration of ill-treatment in the workplace. Training managers to be proactive and to be mindful of the need to ensure accountability is important, as well as communicating what is unacceptable in terms of behaviour and management style. ABSTRACT This paper explores the experiences of workers in a public sector organization in respect of workplace ill-treatment. The paper is based on 11 interviews which were part of the Irish Workplace Behaviour Study (2018). Workplace ill-treatment, and in particular workplace bullying, has been found to be more prevalent in public sector workplaces. Irish public sector workplaces have taken the brunt of severe austerity measures imposed by successive governments as part of the country’s fiscal retrenchment policies between 2008 and 2016. The findings reported in this paper support Salin’s (2003) model of ‘Enabling, motivating, and precipitating structures’, and are considered in the light of psychological contract breach in the context of New Public Management (NPM).
KW - Austerity measures
KW - New Public Management
KW - workplace bullying
KW - workplace ill-treatment
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089785896&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/09540962.2020.1804679
DO - 10.1080/09540962.2020.1804679
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85089785896
SN - 0954-0962
VL - 42
SP - 221
EP - 230
JO - Public Money and Management
JF - Public Money and Management
IS - 4
ER -