Prevalence of Workplace Bullying in Italy

Abstract

Workplace bullying has developed as a topic of interest to many over the last decade. Exposure to workplace bullying has been argued to be a severe stressor and a more devastating problem for affected individual and in turn for their organizations and society as a whole. However, research on this negative behavior in Iran is scarce. There is a need to understand more about the prevalence of the workplace bullying in Iran. Hence, the purpose of this paper was to determine the prevalence rate of this behavior in Iranian workplaces. A nationwide representative sample was used. Eight hundred and ninety two researchermade questionnaires were collected from clerical staff and production workers in banking, manufacturing, teaching, nursing and some of other sectors. The findings suggest that thirty six percent of employees who participated in this study had occasionally or frequently been exposed to bullying in the last year. The sixty four percent of participants had never been bullied during the last year.