The book advances the nascent concept of depersonalized workplace
bullying, highlighting its distinctive features, proposing a theoretical
framework and making recommendations for intervention. Furthering
insights into depersonalized bullying at work is critical due to the
anticipated increased incidence of the phenomenon in the light of the
competitive contemporary business economy, which complicates
organizational survival.
Drawing on two hermeneutic phenomenological inquiries set in India
focusing on targets and bullies, the book evidences that depersonalized
bullying is a sociostructural entity that resides in an organization's
structural, processual and contextual design. Enacted by supervisors and
managers through the engagement of abusive and aggressive behaviours,
depersonalized bullying is resorted to in the pursuit of competitive
advantage as organizations seek to ensure their continuity and success.
Given the instrumentalism associated with the world of work, targets and
bullies encountering depersonalized bullying display largely ambivalent
responses to their predicament. Ironically, then, organizations' gains
in terms of effectiveness are offset by the strains experienced by these
protagonists.
The theoretical generalizability of the findings reported in the book
facilitates the development of an integrated framework of depersonalized
workplace bullying, laying the foundations for forthcoming empirical and
measurement endeavours that progress the concept. The book recognizes
that whereas primary level interventions mandate repositioning the
extra-organizational environment and/or recasting organizational goals
to balance business and employee interests, secondary level and tertiary
level interventions encompass various types of formal and informal
social support to address targets' and bullies' interface with
depersonalized bullying at work.
