Dale Hilty
Mt. Carmel College of Nursing
Title: Development of a Multi-Factored Approach Toward the Assessment of Workplace Bullying, Assertive, Passive, Aggressive, & Coping Behaviors
Biography
Biography: Dale Hilty
Abstract
Workplace bullying is one of the most harmful social stressors in organizations” (Trepanier, Fernet, & Austin, 2013, p. 123). Long-term project goal is to develop a quantitative battery of scales to identify individuals likely to engage in workplace bullying behavior. A comprehensive assessment would include interpersonal influence , coping, anger, teamwork, and conflict scales which may provide reliable and valid psychometric data.
This study is the first phase examining interpersonal influence and coping instrumentation. Carver, Scheier, and Weintraub (1989) proposed four coping scales which can be used to assess workplace bullying: denial (refusal to acknowledge stressor), behavioral disengagement (goal attainment reduction), mental disengagement (goal achievement distracted thinking), and restraint (not acting prematurely). Glaser (n.d.) developed assertive, passive, openly aggressive, and concealed aggressive scales which were selected from the Interpersonal Influence Inventory.
Participants were Bachelor of Science in Nursing undergraduate students who completed the questionnaire consisting of the four Carver et al. (1989) coping scales and the four Glaser (n.d.) interpersonal influence scales.
- Hypothesis 1: Relationship among assertive, denial, and behavioral disengagement.
- Hypothesis 2: Relationship among passive, concealed aggressive, and mental disengagement.
- Hypothesis 3: Small correlations among the openly aggressive, concealed aggressive, mental disengagement, behavioral disengagement, and restraint.
- Using SPSS 25, Pearson correlational analyses was used to determine the relationship among the Carver et al. (1989) and Glaser (n.d.) scales. Coefficient alpha reliability estimates would be calculated for each scale.
Results
Hypothesis 1: Correlational analysis revealed the denial coping scale (-.388, p=.002) and behavioral disengagement coping scale (-.357, p=.005) were negatively correlated with assertive scale. Hypothesis 2: The passive was positively correlated with mental disengagement scale (.264, p=.04). A significant
positive coefficient was found between the passive and concealed aggression scales (.367, p=.004). Hypothesis 3: Correlation coefficients among the openly aggressive, concealed aggressive, mental disengagement, behavioral disengagement, and restraint ranged from .193 to -.039.
The reported findings suggest the interpersonal influence scales (assertive, passive, concealed aggressive, openly aggressive) and coping scales (denial, behavioral disengagement, restraint) offer a preliminary step toward developing a battery of scales designed to assess workplace bullying.