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Women are often regarded as the 'weaker' sex. This negative cliché has portrayed women as vulnerable and defenceless, privy to abuse and victimisation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the inferences of gender in workplace bullying. The study unpacks types, consequences and implications of bullying amongst women. The paper is a meta-analysis, which relied on secondary sources of information. It is a qualitative study that is based on conceptual analysis. Findings of the paper indicate that there are gender differences in reported prevalence rates and forms of bullying. The practical implications of the study is that bullying is a concern and the gendered nature of this form of abuse has implications for the way managers, organisational representatives and policy-makers should address and prevent workplace bullying. The value this paper offers is the assertion that managers, organisational representatives and policy-makers should view workplace bullying as a serious offence. The authors encourage researchers in the field of bullying to pursue further research in area of retaliation as a consequence of bullying and to integrate their findings more firmly in existing research. The South African workplace has overlooked the role of retaliation in encouraging bullying in the workplace. This gap in the research should be investigated.
Key words: bullying, gender, retaliation, workplace
Many researchers agree that bullying is a frequent occurrence in the workplace (Hoel, 2001; Pietersen, 2007; Cunniff & Mostert, 2012). In a study conducted in 2000 by the Work Dignity Institute, it was found that approximately 77.8% of South Africans had experienced bullying in the workplace. More recently, in 2012, it was found that 31.1% of a sample of 13 911 people had experienced workplace bullying (Cunniff & Mostert, 2012). These statistics make it clear that bullying is a prevalent, contemporaiy issue in the South African workplace, yet awareness of and research into bullying in South Africa is still in its infancy (Pietersen, 2007).
Currently, there is no generally accepted definition of workplace bullying, as such bullying can be described in a number of different ways. First, bullying can be described as a gradually evolving process (Einarsen, 1994). During the early phases, victims are typically subjected to very discreet and indirect bullying behaviour and, later, to more direct, aggressive acts. Bullying may eventually...