Mistreatment In The Workplace

Introduction Employee mistreatment is a major liability for any organization. Mistreatment can take a variety of forms in the workplace. One broad definition of the term enumerates various forms that mistreatment can take, including “interpersonal injustice, abusive supervision, social undermining, tyranny, and bullying” (Mayer et al., 2012, p. 24). This essay groups employee mistreatment into four categories: abusive supervision, bullying, incivility, and sexual harassment. These categories often overlap and vary in severity, and they represent a cross-section of the various forms of maltreatment that employees might encounter in virtually any workplace. This is an important issue not only because of the ethically objectionable nature of such behavior in any isolated incident, but because of the widespread nature of the phenomenon. One study finds that an estimated 13.6 percent of employees have experienced abusive supervision, and that 65-75 percent of employees report that their boss is “the worst part of their jobs in any given organization” (Zhang & Bednall, 2016, p. 455).

For example, Zhang and Bednall (2009) offer an inventory of the antecedents of abusive supervision. One framework for understanding how patterns of abuse emerge is the “trickle down” model, which suggests that the affective states of supervisors can be impacted by their interactions with their superiors, and thus have a negative or positive effect on how they treat their subordinates (Zhang & Bednall, 2016, pp. 456-457). Other major causes of abusive supervision include organizational antecedents, such as a culture of aggression; subordinate-related antecedents, such as prior conflicts between a given subordinate and his/her supervisor; and demographic characteristics of all parties involved, especially gender (Zhang & Bednall, 2016, pp.