ABSTRACT
Higher education has witnessed a marked rise in workplace bullying on their campuses over the last 20 years. International researchers writing from countries which nationally prohibit workplace bullying confirmed that preventative training aimed at intercepting workplace bullying in coordination with policies is effective in mitigating job aggression. Therefore, in analyzing a sample of 176 human resources personnel, I investigated two central research questions—RQ1: “Which schools, those that have traditional rules training for human resources or those without traditional training for human resources, are more likely to report higher than the median of three (3) workplace bullying complaints?” and RQ2: Which schools, those with anti-bullying policies that specifically use the term “workplace bullying” or those without anti-bullying policies, are more likely to report higher than the median of three (3) workplace bullying complaints?” Considering sociological theories on expert power, personal power, and organizational power, two of chi-squared analyses are conducted. The findings indicate that, as in the U.S. workplace bullying is not prohibited at the federal level, traditional rules training does not deter workplace bullying in higher education. However, when schools have institutional-level policy explicitly using the term “workplace bullying,” these policies have a statistically significant impact on suppressing the incidents of workplace bullying on campus.
