Premilla D’Cruz
The book advances the nascent concept of
depersonalized workplace bullying, highlighting its distinctive features,
proposing a theoretical framework and making recommendations for intervention.
Furthering insights into depersonalized bullying at work is critical due to the
anticipated increased incidence of the phenomenon in the light of the
competitive contemporary business economy, which complicates organizational
survival.
Drawing on two hermeneutic phenomenological inquiries set
in India focusing on targets and bullies, the book evidences that
depersonalized bullying is a sociostructural entity that resides in an
organization’s structural, processual and contextual design. Enacted by
supervisors and managers through the engagement of abusive and aggressive
behaviours, depersonalized bullying is resorted to in the pursuit of
competitive advantage as organizations seek to ensure their continuity and
success. Given the instrumentalism associated with the world of work, targets
and bullies encountering depersonalized bullying display largely ambivalent
responses to their predicament. Ironically, then, organizations’ gains in terms
of effectiveness are offset by the strains experienced by these protagonists.
The theoretical generalizability of the findings reported
in the book facilitates the development of an integrated framework of
depersonalized workplace bullying, laying the foundations for forthcoming
empirical and measurement endeavours that progress the concept. The book
recognizes that whereas primary level interventions mandate repositioning the
extra-organizational environment and/or recasting organizational goals to
balance business and employee interests, secondary level and tertiary level
interventions encompass various types of formal and informal social support to
address targets’ and bullies’ interface with depersonalized bullying at work.
