Concepts, Approaches and Methods

This volume captures themes and debates around elucidating and studying workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment. The chapters presented here underscore the complexities and nuances of the phenomenon and showcase the various techniques relevant to and concerns associated with researching it. Debates abound as to what workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment is and what it is not, leading to a construct bind. Viewpoints are exchanged over how best to uncover the topic so as to ensure that recommendations for action are anchored in rigour. Section 1 portrays the gamut of variants that constitute workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment, such as interpersonal bullying, depersonalized bullying and cyberbullying, alongside theoretical underpinnings, contentious stances and contemporary contextual influences. Section 2 speaks to the challenges of studying a sensitive, multi-person, multi-level problematic, highlighting the possibilities offered by quantitative, qualitative and mixed paradigms. Advanced designs and innovative strategies that facilitate explanatory power, reliability and validity are put forward.

Premilla D’Cruz holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She is currently Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, India. Together with Ernesto Noronha, Premilla has been researching the area of workplace bullying for over a decade and has covered various facets of the phenomenon through pioneering work which has extended the boundaries of our understanding. In addition to two authored books on workplace bullying (Workplace Bullying in India [Routledge] and Depersonalized Bullying at Work [Springer]), Premilla has recently co-edited both a special issue of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management (Emerald) on workplace bullying and a book titled Indian Perspectives on Workplace Bullying: A Decade of Insights (Springer). She has published numerous papers in reputed peer-reviewed journals, such as Journal of Business Ethics, Information and Organization, Economic and Industrial Democracy and International Journal of Human Resource Management, and made several international presentations on the topic. Premilla’s other research interests include emotions at work, self and identity at work, organizational control, and information and communication technologies (ICTs) and organizations. Premilla has been a visiting scholar at various European and Australian universities and has received multilateral and bilateral study grants, in addition to several awards for outstanding academic and research work throughout her student and professional career. She has been President of the International Association on Workplace Bullying and Harassment (IAWBH) between 2016 and 2018, having earlier served as Secretary (2010–2016) and Special Interest Groups Coordinator (2008–2010). She is currently the section editor of Labour Relations and Business Ethics at the Journal of Business Ethics. More details about Premilla’s work are available at https://www.iima.ac.in/ web/faculty/faculty-profiles/premilla-d-cruz.

Ernesto Noronha holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. He is currently Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, India. Together with Premilla D’Cruz, Ernesto has been involved in pioneering studies on various aspects of workplace bullying and has several published papers and presentations in the substantive area. Ernesto’s other research interests include workplace ethnicity, technology and work, and labour and globalization, and he has numerous papers published in reputed peer-reviewed journals on these topics, including Journal of Business Ethics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Information and Organization and Journal of Contemporary Asia. He has recently co-edited Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment in Globalizing India (Springer). Ernesto has received bilateral and multilateral grants to study various aspects of employee experiences of work in India’s offshoring and outsourcing sector, focusing on new and unexplored areas such as organizational control, diversity, telework and collectivization, in addition to the VVEF Outstanding Researcher Award 2009 and 2017 at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Ernesto has been a Visiting Professor at the Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) School, Cornell University, and at the Institute for Sociology, University of Vienna. He has presented invited talks as a visiting scholar at numerous European universities, such as Strathclyde, Portsmouth, Bergen and Hamburg, in addition to the keynote address at the 2010 Work, Employment and Society (WES) conference. He is currently a board member of the RC30 Sociology of Work group at the International Sociological Association (ISA) and the section editor of Labour Relations and Business Ethics at the Journal of Business Ethics. More details about Ernesto’s work are available at https://www.iima.ac.in/ web/faculty/faculty-profiles/ernesto-noronha.

Guy Notelaers (Ph.D.) started as a Master’s in Political and Social Sciences (KU Leuven, Belgium) with the construction of a Belgian database on occupational stress and well-being in 1999 at the National Institute for the Improvement of Working Conditions. In 2008, he moved to Norway to begin his Ph.D. research. In his Ph.D., Guy examined workplace bullying and risk control, thereby focusing on the measurement of bullying and the identification of bullying and job factors related to its emergence. In 2011, he obtained his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Bergen. After being Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour (Maastricht University, the Netherlands) and of Strategic Human Resource Management (Radboud University, the Netherlands), he became Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology (WOP) at the University of Bergen in Norway in 2014. Guy’s work in WOP is characterized byhis interest in statistics, modelling and measurement.


Charlotte Rayner is Professor Emeritus at the Portsmouth Business School, UK. Charlotte came from a small business background to teach strategy and organizational behaviour, becoming interested in workplace bullying in the mid-1990s. She remains focused on helping organizations deal with bullying and, through the BBC, unions and employers, has researched and raised the profile of the issue. Charlotte was a founding member of the International Association on Workplace Bullying and Harassment (IAWBH) and its first President. In 2005, Charlotte won a large grant to research successful anti-bullying interventions in British workplaces. More recently, Charlotte has studied Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) because it includes elements such as emotion, belief and transcendence. She believes broadening our methods, analysis and attitudes to include much more of what it is to be human, as is being attempted in POS, will contribute to understanding and solving workplace bullying.