A Strategic Framework of Workplace Cyberbullying Intervention for Health Organisations

Introduction

While information technology (IT) is widely recognised as a catalyst for enhancing organisational productivity, it is also important to acknowledge its potential to enable workplace bullying via online platforms (Farley et al., 2021), leading to the emergence of workplace cyberbullying that threatens organisational morale and productivity. For example, a study from Japan revealed that 8.0% of the surveyed employees had experienced cyberbullying on a weekly basis, and the victims generally actively engaged in teleworking and active information dissemination via the Internet (Ikeda et al., 2022). In health organisations, workplace cyberbullying holds particular significance in personnel management. Given the nature of health professionals’ work that involves intense interactions with different groups of individuals (e.g., with patients), instances of bullying are highly liked to be triggered due to the high-level interpersonal interactions (Zahlquist et al., 2023). Accordingly, there is an emerging awareness of workplace cyberbullying within this context, not only due to the high-stress nature of health work but also because the repercussions of such bullying behaviour may negatively affect employee mental stress and job satisfaction (Coyne et al., 2017) and further reduce the quality of patient care and employee retention rate. Responding to the raising awareness, an increasing amount of research literature has discussed this issue in health organisations from diverse aspects, such as definition (D'Souza et al., 2018), influencing factor (Kim & Choi, 2021), impact (Farley et al., 2015), and intervention programme (Kim et al., 2020).

In the wake of workplace cyberbullying among health professionals, health organisations struggle to establish an effective intervention mechanism. Though scholars have posited various tactics for controlling workplace cyberbullying and prepared the theoretical foundation for intervention programmes (Oguz et al., 2023), there remains a significant gap in how health organisations should deploy anti-cyberbullying strategies systematically, especially from the perspectives of the human resources (HR) and legal professionals that are proximate to the dynamics of the workplace due to the job nature.

Professional voices on digital media remain an underexplored source of information on this matter. The Internet and digital media are becoming preferred channels for communication to improve the public understanding of science and engage the public with science (Illingworth, 2017), which also serve as channels for disseminating expert insight on studied workplace issues. The growingly active presence of HR and legal professionals in digital media has led to a growing amount of advisory information on workplace cyberbullying being shared and circulated online. Nonetheless, limited research efforts are paid to synthesise these proposed strategies into a framework for health organisations. Framing the online resources of intervention strategies for workplace cyberbullying offers a guideline for managers in health organisations to combat workplace cyberbullying, and such a framework also provides a systematic view of different organisational strategies for workplace cyberbullying that may be examined for their effectiveness by researchers.