Andreas Liefooghe

Accounts of workplace bullying: The role of the organization

In over a decade of research into bullying at work, the focus has been on defining, measuring, and explaining the essential nature of the bullying phenomenon. This focus has positioned the individual as the main unit of analysis, with the organization acting as a facilitating backdrop. By assuming a critical research position as opposed to the dominant positivist tradition from which most of the bullying research emanates, attention can be drawn to additional and marginalized accounts. Our research does not offer a definition of bullying—rather, we examine the implications of the different ways in which the term bullying is used. This paper uses data from a case study in a large telecommunications companys call centres. We demonstrate that while employees use the pathologized individual and the facilitating environment to account for bullying, in addition they use the notion of the pathologized organization. This additional narrative brings issues of power and politics in organizations to the fore. Taking a critical management approach, we focus on employee accounts of the oppressive impact of power structures. We argue that marginalizing certain accounts functions to maintain the organizational power balance. By using the term bullying to describe their work experience, employees in this study sought to employ an emotive and highly charged term to highlight their discontent at increasingly difficult work situations.

Organizational Support, Individual Attributes, and the Practice of Career Self-Management Behavior

This article reports the findings of a study, conducted in a UK new media company, that investigated direct and interactive relationships between perceived organizational support (POS), leader—member exchange (LMX), gender, locus of control, and practice of career self-management behaviors. The results show that it is the interactive relationships that have stronger links with internally focused career self-management behavior, whereas the direct associations, with the exception of LMX, are more closely related to externally oriented career self-management activities. POS moderates the relationship between both gender and locus of control and internally focused career self-management behavior, suggesting that it may send out a signal to certain employees about how supportive the organizational environment is of career self-management. Men and women are shown to act in different ways, depending on the level of POS that they receive, whereas POS encourages individuals with an internal locus of control to engage in internal career self-management behavior, in line with trait activation theory. LMX operates more directly, suggesting that it is a source of practical help with career self-management aimed at furthering the career within the organization; interaction results show that, when LMX is absent, men and those with an internal locus of control engage in internal networking behavior, presumably to find other sources of such help.

‘In the name of capability’: A critical discursive evaluation of competency-based management development

This article illustrates a number of ways in which competency or capability-based management development (CBMD) can work simultaneously both for and against the interests of organizational agents. It does so by demonstrating how CBMD might usefully be understood as both ideological and quasi-religiously faith-based. These features are shown to provide opportunities for resistance and micro-emancipation alongside those for repression and subordination. The study employs a combination of ‘middle range’ discourse analytical techniques. In the first instance, critical discourse analysis is applied to company documentation to distil the ideological stance of an international organization’s CBMD programme. Critical discursive psychology is then used to assess the ways in which employees’ evaluative accounts both support and resist such stance. The analysis builds upon previous insights from Foucauldian studies of CBMD by foregrounding processes of discursive agency. It also renders more visible and discussible the assumptions and dilemmas that CBMD might imply.

Employee accounts of bullying at work

When incidence rates of bullying tend to be reported at levels of approximately 10% when measured by instruments such as the Negative Acts Questionnaire (NAQ), but self-report measures are closer to 50%, the question arises as to how we explain the missing 40%. This case study offers some suggestions by exploring the views of employees regarding bullying at work. Using Discourse Analysis (DA), findings suggest that the use of the term bullying varies in ordinary talk, incorporating a more organisational dimension of bullying. The implications of this are reviewed.

Enjoy your Stress! Using Lacan to enrich transactional models of stress

This article reconsiders stress both theoretically and empirically using a Lacanian perspective. It addresses how Lacan’s concepts of jouissance and desire may be employed to provide a rich overlay to transactional models of stress that engages with unconscious aspects of appraisal. In doing so, it challenges the dichotomy between stress and enjoyment.

What's the deal? An exploration of career management behaviour in Iceland

This article reports the findings of a longitudinal study that investigated the nature of the career deal in Iceland, chosen as a research setting because it potentially offers a very different career environment to that which exists in the UK and US, where most previous research examining contemporary careers has been conducted. The findings show that certain dimensions of the contemporary career deal shown to exist in the UK are less apparent in the Icelandic context. While a close reciprocal relationship between career self-management behaviour and organizational career management help does exist, other potential aspects of the deal are absent. In Iceland, individuals who get more help with managing their careers are more committed to their employer but this commitment does not imply that they will do more to manage their own careers with their current employer as result. In addition, no links were found between career management activities and job performance. In Iceland individuals do not engage in career self-management behaviour to any great extent and when they do, their behaviour does not seem to have the same kind of focus or meaning that it has been shown to have in the context of the contemporary career deal that exists in the UK.

Mind the Gap: Revisioning Organization Development as Pragmatic Reconstruction:

This article identifies the possibilities for a revisioning of organization development (OD) in light of a resurgent debate within both OD and the wider field of organization studies. Scholar—practitioner, theory—practice, and relevance—rigor are terms within the debate that indicate what are seen as the challenges. In the context of this debate, the authors review the theory and practice of New OD and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) both as sources of insights into approaches to OD and organizational change and as pointers to the gaps along the way of seeking to address these challenges. The authors discuss what else can be learned from approaches that are based on concepts of organization practice. In light of this understanding, the authors argue for a revisioning of OD as a process of engaged inquiry that changes organizations by changing their practices.

The art of stress

This article argues that the later work of Foucault, notably that set out in The History of Sexuality, can make a useful contribution to organizational and occupational psychology. It goes on to analyse accounts of stress, related by client-service workers during interviews, using concepts informed by this work. Such a method of analysing a key work experience takes us beyond the positivism that dominates the large stress literature. Our emphasis is on Foucaults ideas relating to the creation of oneself as a work of art and the moral problematization of pleasure, rather than the more commonly applied surveillance and disciplinary controls. We consider stress discourse in this light and note the often overlooked heterogeneity of these stress accounts and self-portraits. We note that creation of self may itself be a ‘stressful’ process. This use of Foucault allows a rich reading of stress discourses and could, the authors believe, be applied in other organizational and occupational research.

Bullying at Work: Cognitive Appraisal of Negative Acts, Coping, Wellbeing and Performance

The negative outcomes of experiencing workplace bullying are well documented, but a strong theoretical explanation for this has been relatively neglected. We draw on cognitive appraisal theory to suggest that individuals’ appraisals of and responses to negative acts at work will moderate the impact of said acts on wellbeing and performance outcomes. In a large study (N = 3,217) in Southeast Asia, we examine moderators in the form of (a) the extent to which individuals identify themselves as being bullied and (b) the coping strategies that individuals use to deal with negative acts. We find that these factors do moderate the impact of experiencing negative acts, in particular work-related negative acts. When individuals are subject to work-related negative acts but do not see themselves as being bullied they report higher levels of performance than those who do identify themselves as being bullied. Problem-focused coping was found to be effective for those sometimes targeted, but for persistent targets was detrimental to wellbeing. The present research has important implications for bullying research in examining factors that contribute to outcomes of bullying.

Thanatos: Freudian manifestations of death at work

While Eros in all his vicissitudes has been analysed, reinvented and applied, Thanatos 1 has held an important but overlooked place in the canon of psychoanalytic literature. This research note draws on Freudian theoretical notions of death and applies these to organizational demise. Psychoanalytic writing on death is examined and the theory themed through aspects of: loss vs. desire; the impossibility of death; and nothingness vs. destruction and working through death. This is then considered as a means to better understand organizational collapse. We argue that Freudian notions of death provide a useful lens through which to view organizational mortality.