Silenced and stressed: impact of reporting workplace bullying and harassment for academic staff in Irish higher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Workplace well-being is an increasingly critical issue influenced by systemic factors, particularly in academic settings. This study investigated workplace bullying (WPB) and harassment in higher education institutions in Ireland, drawing upon the Ottawa Charter and conservation of resources theory to contextualise the impacts on employee well-being. Design/methodology/approach Twenty-five participants responded to a survey that first measured occurrences and impact of WPB. The survey was followed by open-ended questioning eliciting narratives around the experience of reporting WPB to reveal organisational responses and subsequent impacts of reporting WPB. Findings The prevalence of barriers to reporting showed that out of 25 participants, 18 experienced barriers to reporting WPB. Seventeen participants documented the negative impacts of barriers to reporting WPB. Lack of human resource management (HRM) implementation incurred organisational consequences, such as increased staff turnover and a negative impact on institutional culture. Research limitations/implications The online survey was conducted during the summer annual leave period, which impeded distribution. The mixed-method approach did not capture complete narratives from some participants in response to the open-ended question. Furthermore, all disclosures were self-reported, making it challenging to confirm that the reported impacts were directly linked to workplace experiences. Practical implications The findings of this research highlight the need for more effective HRM practices, leadership training and accountability to manage WPB reporting processes to reduce impact and inform prevention. Social implications The challenges of reporting WPB have broader social ramifications, affecting the overall well-being of academic staff and institutional cultures. Originality/value This approach moved away from WPB as the measured impact, focusing on the subsequent impacts of voicing concern.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".