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Discouraging Bullying: The Role of Ethical Leadership and its Effects on the Work Environment

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Abstract

Bullying is one of the most impactful deviant actions that affects workers’ personal health and work experience. Bullying is a quite distinctive deviant behavior as targets are subjected to transgressions that could last for months or longer. Even though a number of actions can be taken to resolve bullying between all parties, from the viewpoint of the target it is hard to resolve the situation. As a result, hierarchical influence may be necessary to prevent bullying in the first place. A possible solution, therefore, is focusing on how leaders can impact the bullying behavior. This research argued and showed that ethical leadership is negatively associated with being bullied through tackling one of its most important antecedents of bullying: the design of the work environment. That is, ethical leaders could be shown to improve employees’ workload (quantitative work environment) and poor working conditions (qualitative work environment), which was related to decreased bullying.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, Box 3725, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Jeroen Stouten, Jeroen Camps, Hans De Witte & Martin Euwema

  2. HUBrussel, Brussel, Belgium

    Elfi Baillien & Anja Van den Broeck

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  1. Jeroen Stouten
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  2. Elfi Baillien
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  3. Anja Van den Broeck
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  4. Jeroen Camps
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  5. Hans De Witte
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  6. Martin Euwema
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Correspondence to Jeroen Stouten.

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Stouten, J., Baillien, E., Van den Broeck, A. et al. Discouraging Bullying: The Role of Ethical Leadership and its Effects on the Work Environment. J Bus Ethics 95 (Suppl 1), 17–27 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0797-x

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