Transformative Leadership for True Workplace Collaboration: Strengthening Workplace Culture through Attention to Workplace Bullying Affronts

Transformative leadership is governance devoted to change in individuals and in social systems. It emphasizes actions aimed simultaneously toward organizational effectiveness and moral commitment to organizational stakeholders. Because transformational leadership is intended to incorporate concurrent consideration of both ethics and effectiveness, its influence in governance can be considered robust and appropriate, both ethically and technically—at least in theory. The effectiveness of transformative leadership is significantly hindered, however, by acts of workplace bullying.

Even in settings in which leadership is transformative, workplace bullying is common and disruptive. Seldom are bullying's constitutive acts readily apparent. Instead, its acts tend to be surreptitious, typically involving subtle, often largely nonverbal interpersonal affronts that appear trivial to those not directly targeted by the bully. Despite its furtive and seemingly innocuous nature, workplace bullying is broadly devastating, affecting targeted victims, uninvolved bystanders, and organizations as wholes.

When bullying is allowed to transpire unconstrained, leadership actions intended to foster an effective and ethical work environment become largely inadequate, significantly hampered by the subtle interpersonal affronts that typically constitute bullying acts. Workplace bullying's paradoxical occurrence yields widespread chaos. The intent of transformative leadership is lost when workplace bullying is in force.

This presentation summarizes a metasynthesis of findings that cut across the investigators’ mixed-methods, qualitative studies of workplace culture and dynamics, specifically addressing factors that promulgate workplace bullying and that, ultimately, stall transformative leadership and interfere with true collaboration. Collected through systematic review and synthesis of broad, interdisciplinary research and prose, study findings provide evidence-based descriptions of some of the core mechanisms of workplace bullying. Without attention to those mechanisms, there can be no true collaboration, as efforts on the parts of workplace stakeholders shift from productivity concerns to concerns about personal safety.

The presentation will focus on the ways workplace bullies are able to hide in plain sight, acting to shame intended targets who become vulnerable victims by virtue of their lived histories and sense of self. Because bullying destroys collaboration in workplace cultures, we examine how, through transformative leadership, administrators can build just cultures in workplace organizations to establish and maintain a context that will not condone workplace bullying. Additionally, we address the character of true collaboration as it emerges in safe healthy, workplace environments, those in which administrators are able to engage fully in transformative leadership.