A Qualitative Investigation of Workplace Bullying Construction: A Case Study on Hikma Pharmaceutical Company in Jordan

This research explores the ways in which Human Resource Practitioners construct their notions of bullying in workplace, as a consequence fills a gap in the literature on bullying in the workplace. Human Resource Practitioners (HRPs) were interviewed with using semi-structured interview questions and the data from the interviews were analysed with the NVIVO package. The results indicate that bullying in the workplace is rather a complex problem for the HRPs as a result of three factors, management orientated policies on the occurrence of bullying, pressure within organisations that have been designed to protect managers, and the general lack of power of both HRPs and Human Resource Management, in organisations. The participants used several interpretive mechanisms with bullying in the workplace, and these tended to place blame on the recipient of the bullying and give legitimacy to the behaviour of the manager, despite the characteristics of the bullying behavior conforming to the definitions of bullying reported in academic research. The nature of the way in which claims of bullying was constructed by HRPs was dependent upon who the bully was, for example, if he was the victim’s colleague or manager. A consistent finding was that HRPs constructed claims of bullying between work colleagues as an interpersonal relationship with a level of conflict and claims between employee and manager as the victim’s response to management and performance work practices. Such results have substantial implications for practice and research in the future. Since, the constructions found in this research tends suggests that the behavior of management in employee and manager claims of bullying would probably not be constructed by HRPs as bullying in the workplace.