Bullying in the Nursing Workplace: A Study of Perioperative Nurses

Abstract

Bullying in the nursing workplace has been researched for many years and continues unabated. The purpose of the quantitative correlation research study was twofold. The first purpose was to support the validity of the Hutchinson, Jackson, Wilkes, and Vickers’ explanatory model of bullying in the nursing workplace with a sample of Registered Nurses from the United States of America. The second purpose of this study was to examine the potential negative effects of bullying in the perioperative workplace on patient outcomes in terms of surgical never events. A revised version of the Workplace Bullying Inventory (WBI) was administered over the Internet to measure nurses’ perceptions of the levels of bullying in the perioperative nursing workplace and the impact of bullying on patient outcomes as determined by the occurrence of surgical never events. The Spearman’s rank correlation determined that there is a statistically significant relationship between each of the three subscale measures of the levels of exposure to bullying in the perioperative nursing workplace. This supported the first three hypotheses that there is a statistically significant relationship between the levels of exposure to the bullying in the perioperative nursing workplace variables as measured by the three subscales of the WBI. The stepwise linear regression analysis indicated that there was a statistically significant positive relationships between organizational predictors of bullying and each of the five surgical never events. The stepwise linear regression analysis indicated that there was a statistically significant negative relationship between consequences of bullying, and each of the five surgical never events. There was no statistically significant relationship between bullying acts and each of the surgical never events.