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To help or not to help: Development of prosocial behaviors among witnesses of workplace bullying

par Lucas, Emeline ;Hellemans, Catherine
Référence Meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Science (BAPS) (May 28th 2015: Brussels)
Publication Non publié, 2015

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Résumé :

Besides persecutor-victim system, the colleagues have also a key role to play in workplace bullying. Indeed, they are witnesses to bullying episodes, and they have the power to act inside the system, even to stop harassment, but they often do not (Bowes-Sperry & O’Leary-Kelly, 2005). Our research focuses on explanatory factors of (non-)development of help behaviors towards harassed people at work, in particular organizational climate, causal attribution and attributions of responsibility. The participants were eight employees, witnesses of real workplace bullying. We questioned them thanks to a semi-directive interview guide. Corpus of transcripts was subjected to a thematic content analysis. Prosocial behaviors reported were categorized according to their level of immediacy and personal social involvement. Three types of attribution of responsibility to the harasser were highlighted, two types to the harassed, and two types to the organization. At the organization level, it was highlighted preexisting conditions promoting workplace harassment, but also a large number of processual factors taking place at the time of the harassment and fostering its upholding. One of the major results has been to highlight differential justifications for action, for ambivalence and for inaction faced with workplace bullying, including, not belief in a just world, but somehow its inverse: sensitivity to injustice and moral courage (Vega & Comer, 2011), opening new perspectives for research and more nuanced field interventions.