Organizational politics, anger and workplace cyberbullying perpetration: a multigroup analysis of gender
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing on affective events theory, the purpose of this paper was to investigate direct and indirect relationships between perceived organizational politics and workplace cyberbullying (WCB) perpetration mediated through anger, as well as to examine the moderating role of gender in these relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
The sample comprised 534 white-collar employees who were employed in a variety of service industries, including banking, higher education, telecommunications, health care and insurance in Islamabad, Pakistan. Data were analyzed using the structural equation modeling technique in Amos.
Findings
Results demonstrated that perceived organizational politics has a direct positive effect on WCB perpetration. Moreover, results indicated that perceived organizational politics evokes anger among employees that, in turn, triggers WCB perpetration. Results of a multigroup analysis revealed that the positive effect of perceived organizational politics on WCB perpetration was not significantly different between men and women. However, the positive relationship between perceived organizational politics and anger was significantly stronger for men than for women. Likewise, this study found a significantly stronger relationship for men than for women between anger and WCB perpetration. Anger partially mediated the relationship between perceived organizational politics and WCB perpetration only among men.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that perceived organizational politics triggers WCB perpetration directly and indirectly through its impact on anger. Moreover, this study identified gender differences in the experience and expression of anger in response to perceived organizational politics.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work.
Conflict of interest : The authors state that there is no conflict of interest.
Compliance with ethical standards:
Ethical approval: All data were collected following ethical principles for dealing with human subjects.
Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Financial and non-financial interests: The authors have no relevant financial and non-financial interests to disclose.
Data availability: The data sets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Citation
Malik, O.F. and Pichler, S. (2024), "Organizational politics, anger and workplace cyberbullying perpetration: a multigroup analysis of gender", Management Research Review, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/MRR-08-2023-0622
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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