Nursing faculty bullying: Concept analysis

Objective: The purpose of this review was to clarify the concept of nursing faculty bullying. Unlike published reviews that highlight incivility that involve students and faculty, the authors sought to develop the concept of nursing faculty bullying occurring in nursing schools. Design: The systematic eight step approach to a concept analysis developed by Walker and Avant was the framework to explore nursing faculty bullying. Data sources: A review of existing literature on nursing faculty bullying was conducted using the electronic databases of Cumulative Index for Nursing and Allied Health, PubMed, ProQuest, and Ovid. Search terms included incivility, faculty to faculty incivility, social bullying, and faculty bullying. Results: An operational definition and defining attributes were developed as well as a discussion of several model cases, antecedents, consequences, and empirical referents of nursing faculty bullying. Conclusions: The concept of nursing faculty bullying has several critical characteristics that help clarify its meaning, including the negative interactions between nursing faculty, repetitive behavior, purposeful harmful acts, and imbalance of power. The consequences of these characteristics can be emotionally and mentally harmful to nursing faculty affecting career development and advancement. Future research should explore interventions that could prevent these negative consequences.