A multi-mediation model of the relationship among workplace bullying, coping strategies, resilience and employees’ strain: Insights for a training programme
Keywords:
workplace bullying, coping strategies, resilience, multi-mediation model, mental strain, training programme, ABCD modelAbstract
This article presents two empirical studies. The first one supports a multi-mediation model of the relationship among workplace bullying, coping strategies, resilience, and employees’ mental strain, which was the main study’s objective. The second one presents a training programme’s efficiency for employees’ resilience levels. The first study was composed of 172 Romanian employees (114 female; 58 male) with ages ranging from 22 to 62 years old (M = 33.25; SD = 8.92) who completed online questionnaires measuring workplace bullying, coping strategies, resilience, and strain. From these 172 Romanian employees, 15 were selected to participate in the second study based on their scores from the first study. Results of the first study showed a significant multi-mediation model in which focus on and venting of emotions, as a coping strategy, and resilience mediated the relationship between workplace bullying and strain. When workplace bullying target employees encountered workplace bullying acts, they used significantly focus on and venting of emotions, as a coping strategy, this was associated with a decreased resilience level and with an increased mental strain increased. The results of the present research provide evidence that in case of workplace bullying exposure, targeted employees will focus more on their emotion, and their level of resilience and mental strain might decrease. The results of the first study inspired the second one using a pre-test and post-test design in which a training programme is employed in order to improve employees’ levels of resilience. The results showed that after participating in the training programme, participants had higher levels of resilience, and achieved the ability to separate the objective reason for workplace bullying acts from their personal beliefs about the stressful situation. These results have practical implications because they suggest human resources practitioners should develop training programmes for exposed employees in order to improve their resilience.
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