Abstract
Workplace cyberbullying has become an emerging issue in health organisations, which has negative impacts on health professionals' performance and well-being. A growing body of intervention strategies have been proposed by legal and human resources professionals for guiding managerial practice. However, limited efforts are paid to synthesise diverse measures for a systematic understanding of intervention strategies. To close this gap, this study conducts a content analysis of 50 articles containing professional opinions and a strategic framework is produced. Education, policies, procedures, and organisational changes are highlighted as the four intervention strategies for health organisations, and detailed components are presented for each strategy's implementation. Pragmatically, this study facilitates health organisation managers to understand and implement the systematic intervention of workplace cyberbullying. For researchers, this framework provides them with directions for examining how workplace cyberbullying can be addressed effectively by the presented strategies.
TopIntroduction
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.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Organisational Culture: The shared values, beliefs, and norms that shape the individual behaviour and interaction within a particular organisation.
Intervention: A purposeful and planned action taken by individuals or organisations to address a particular situation, problem, or challenge.
Health Organisation: An entity dedicated to promoting health, providing medical services, and conducting healthcare-related activities (e.g., hospital, clinic, medical centre, and healthcare agency),
Awareness Communication: An activity of disseminating information with the primary goal of enhancing knowledge, understanding, and consciousness of a particular issue.
Workplace Cyberbullying: The intended and repeated use of information technology tools to harm, intimidate, or harass individuals in an organisational setting.
Grievance Procedure: A formalised and structured process established by an organisation to address and resolve employee complaints.
Employee Training: An organised learning initiative designed to impart specific knowledge, skills, and competencies to employees of an organisation.
Health Professional: An individual who works in a specific field of healthcare with specialised education, training, and certification undergone.