How individual involvement with digitalized work and digitalization at the workplace level impacts supervisory and coworker bullying in german workplaces

Digitalized work has gained importance across industrialized countries. Simultaneously, research investigating the consequences of digitalized work for workplace relations among employees, supervisors, and coworkers, such as workplace bullying, is largely missing. This study is, to the best of our k...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Melzer, Silvia Maja, Diewald, Martin
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10230/54840
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/54840
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/socsci9090156
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Workplace bullying
Digitalization
Job autonomy
Routine work
Linked employer-employee data
Supervisors
Descripción
Sumario:Digitalized work has gained importance across industrialized countries. Simultaneously, research investigating the consequences of digitalized work for workplace relations among employees, supervisors, and coworkers, such as workplace bullying, is largely missing. This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to investigate how digitalized work influences supervisory and coworker bullying dependent on individual, job, and workplace characteristics. We use representative linked-employer-employee data from 3612 employees located in 100 large workplaces in Germany across all industrial sectors and apply random effects multilevel linear analyses. Individual involvement in digitalized work is related to less supervisory bullying for all employees, and for lower qualified employees to less coworker bullying. At the workplace level, when digitalization has advanced, supervisory bullying increases for highly qualified employees. Neither the individual nor the workplace effects of digitalization are explained by mediating factors such as job autonomy, routine or machine work, competency, or psychological or physical stress. Competence and job autonomy prevent the occurrence of bullying, while routine work, psychological stress, and physically demanding work are positively related to bullying. All effects are more pronounced for supervisory bullying than for coworker bullying. Individual involvement with digitalized work seems to change relational dynamics within workplaces and to protect employees from bullying. For highly qualified employees, this is probably related to the gathering of key competencies; for lower qualified employees, it might be linked to working with digital devices. In workplaces where digitalization has progressed, digitalized work may disrupt and change the established work processes and relations and increase the necessity for new coordination and, thus, the occurrence of conflicts.