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Introduction
A healthy workplace tends to have many positive impacts on the organization, yet workplace bullying poses a significant threat to workplace wellness and safety in contemporary organizations with its potential to have pervasive negative impacts to bystanders, witnesses, and the organizations where it is prevalent. According to the World Health Organization:
A healthy workplace is a place where everyone works together to achieve an agreed vision for the health and well-being of workers and the surrounding community. It provides all members of the workforce with physical, psychological, social, and organizational conditions that protect and promote health and safety. It enables managers and workers to increase control over their own health and to improve it, and to become more energetic, positive and contented
(Burton, 2010, p. 15).
Many organizations broaden the definition to include not only exercise and healthy eating habits at work but also care and treatment options for mental and emotional health, healthy lifestyle choices, stress reduction, and therapy.
Per Caltabiano and Ricciardelli (2012), these workplace wellness objectives manifest in additional benefits to employers in terms of higher productivity, lower staff turnover rates, a reduction in insurance compensation claims as well as fewer instances of conflict, sickness, and absenteeism. The potential financial benefits to employers for a healthy workplace are such that organizations of all sizes are coming to recognize the benefits associated with the investment in workplace wellness programs. Many employee benefit packages now highlight the workplace wellness programs available through the employer.
To preface this study, the aim and structure of this research will be overviewed. This study was specifically designed as an extension to the study by Georgakopoulos et al. (2011) who investigated workplace bullying in depth and discovered in their findings that workplace wellness and workplace safety were among the two prominent solutions that over 100 participants perceived would combat and prevent workplace bullying. Thus, from the onset of this study, it was an imperative goal to further research in this area and discover what workplace wellness means to workplace professionals in relation to how they perceive it can tackle workplace bullying specifically.
First, this study will proceed by overviewing systems theory because it informed both the methods and findings and further has implications to organizations as will be...