Morten Nielsen
Title: Harassment and mistreatment in organizations
Workplace harassment, or mistreatment, refers to a situation where an employee is persistently
confronted to psychological or physical aggression from others at the workplace and where the
employee finds it difficult to retaliate against the perpetrator. Over the last 25 years, research has
established harassment as a prevalent and detrimental stressor in the workplace. During the first
years of research, the understanding of the phenomenon relied cross-sectional evidence from
convenience samples. As the field has developed and gained wider acceptance within the scientific
community, study designs have become more sophisticated with a stronger emphasis on prospective
and meta-analytic evidence. As a consequence of this development, the empirical basis for workplace
harassment as a social stressor has become more robust and trustworthy. The aim of this
presentation is to provide an overview of the state of the art of research on workplace harassment by
reviewing prospective studies and meta-analytical evidence on the prevalence, predictors, and
outcomes of harassment. Four main topics will be highlighted: 1) How differences in prevalence rates
are not only dependent upon cross-cultural factors, but also on how the phenomenon is investigated.
2) The associations between workplace harassment and individual and organizational stressors, with a
special emphasis on personality characteristics. 3) The potential consequences of harassment and
challenges with establishing causality. 4) The unexplored issues within the field.