Article

Severe Workplace Conflict: The Experience of Mobbing

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Abstract

Workplace mobbing is a particularly serious phenomenon that is extremely costly to organizations and the health of those targeted. This article reports on a study of self‐identified targets of mobbing, which advances understanding of the way the problem is conceptualized, including associated informal and formal power relationships with organizations. Participants report a number of experiences, such as lengthy investigations and escalation of conflict, that result in an increasingly unbalanced sense of power away from the individual and toward the organization. Revealed is a mismatch between the expected organizational justice processes and support and the actual experience. Findings support a five‐stage process of mobbing, which commences with unresolved conflict and leads ultimately to expulsion from the organization. The study contributes an understanding of a sixth transformational stage that allows the development of personal agency and a rebalanced sense of power. Recommendations of strategic approaches to address the phenomenon of mobbing are discussed.

Keywords:

• procedural fairness,
• organizational justice,
• workplace mobbing,
• workplace conflict