Attitudes Toward Workplace Mobbing in Slovenian Research Organisations

Abstract

Creating a “mobbing-safe” working environment can be a real challenge; to achieve it, a better understanding of related constructs is necessary. To obtain insight into researchers’ attitudes toward workplace mobbing and behavioural intentions, we used a case scenario method. The results show that respondents, on average, consider the mobbing cases presented in a questionnaire to be very serious. Their attitudes and behavioural intentions depend more on their opinion about colleagues’ attitudes and related intentions and less on their own, which shows a lower integrity than desired. Low willingness to report the violator, lenient discipline sanctions and the absence of proper organisational rules create favourable conditions for workplace mobbing in Slovenian public research organisations. This paper also proposes measures based on the research findings of various authors and identifies new questions that could be addressed in further research.