Depersonalized Bullying at Work

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 experien