For over 30 years, researchers have described workplace bullying’s impact, designating affronting actions; measuring victim responses; and characterizing bullying’s influences on workplace culture and climate. Still, bullying’s essential characteristics—its core, dynamic processes—remain unclear (Dzurec, 2019), despite bullying's noted prevalence in nursing and higher education. Bullying's potential to disrupt research translation through constraint of effective communication and creativity is widely-recognized. This presentation highlights the conduct and utility of critical hermeneutic method (Phillips & Brown, 1993) for modeling bullying's essential characteristics and, then, examining bullying's impact on nursing education science.
Methods:
Grounded in abductive reasoning—making good guesses from available data—critical hermeneutic method supports development of evidence-based, working hypotheses through three steps: 1. assessing the character of interpersonal interactions within given contexts; 2. identifying contextual rules and conventions that shape day-to-day interactions; and 3. recognizing the emergent, thematic interplay of interactions and contextual conventions. Critical hermeneutic analysis (>125 published bullying reports) supported investigator development of an abductive model of workplace bullying’s dynamic core, contributing to initial understanding of how workplace bullying might act to impede nurse educators’ research translation efforts and constrain the science of nursing education.
Results:
Study analyses drew focused attention to bullying’s inherent ambiguity and to bullies' abilities to simultaneously 'show and hide' (Roberge, 2011) as they skillfully deliver their demeaning messages. Workplace bullies actively and subtly encourage administrators to condone or pardon them (Dzurec, 2013). In turn, victims self-referentially feel (Brader, Valentino, & Suhay, 2004) bullying threats in terms of personal history (Heidegger, 2008/1962). Thus, consideration and introduction of new, evidence-based ideas and advancements are stymied. The model of bullying's core dynamics emerged as follows:
- bullies exploit personal communicative competence (Hyme, 1972) and narrative agency (Tye-Williams & Krone, 2015) through engaging, ‘narratively probable’ (Fisher, 1985) story-telling;
- victims interpret bullies’ meanings subjectively, negatively, and self-referentially (Ariely, 2008; Lotto, 2017; Roberge, 2011; Sontag, 1966) through story-listening (Brennan, et al.2012; Willems, et al., 2015);
- workplace administrators, through action and policy, often deny the seriousness and consequences of bullying (Dzurec, 2013, 2019; Glambek, Skogstad, & Einarsen, 2018; Westercamp, 2013) and its stories; and
- story-telling and -listening, enacted within the context of established workplace rules, conventions, and endorsements, yield ‘out-of-control dynamics’ (Cilliers, 2012), leading to workplace toxicity and impeded research translation and use.
Workplace bullying seldom rises to the level of physical assault in nursing education settings. Yet, through context-mediated story-telling and -listening, bullying injures targeted victims physically and emotionally (Meriläinen & Kõiv, 2019), hindering co-worker willingness to try anything new, and damaging workplace culture and productivity (Abolfazl Vagharseyyedin, 2015). It yields a ‘chilly’ (Lester, 2009, p. 444) environment that, as it becomes altogether toxic (Lutgen-Sandvik & Arsht, 2014), acts to limit effective research translation (Wu, Liu, Kwan, & Lee, 2016) in all settings, including nursing education.
Model presentations have been well-received and deemed trustworthy by reviewers.
Conclusion:
Critical hermeneutic method supported development of a cogent and acceptable model of bullying's dynamic core, demonstrating the utility of the method for studying and understanding complex phenomena, like bullying, that can impede advancement of the science of nursing education.