Seeing workplace bullying through a glass darkly: The illuminating role of organizational and individual ethics

Workplace bullying is an ethical concern, suggesting that its occurrence is connected to the ethical characteristics of organizations and employees. Drawing from routine activity theory, this investigation explored proposed relationships among multiple measures of organizational ethics, individual ethics, and perceived bullying. Two separate investigations used time-lagged data collected from 210 business professionals in Study 1 and 210 individuals in Study 2. Results indicated that ethics training and perceived corporate social responsibility were positively related to moral attentiveness, perceived corporate ethical values were negatively related to moral attentiveness and moral disengagement, and attentiveness and disengagement were variably and positively related to perceived bullying. Perceived social responsibility and ethical values were also variably and negatively related to bullying. The findings suggest that corporate practices encouraging employee ethics should reduce workplace bullying.