Embracing New Directions in Workplace Bullying Research

Abstract

This article examines the workplace bullying literature through different paradigmatic lenses. To date, the workplace bullying literature has been dominated by the functionalist perspective, which currently represents the pervading paradigmatic approach in organizational research. The author destabilizes the functionalist approach by examining the workplace bullying literature through three alternative paradigms, namely, interpretivism, critical management theory, and postmodernism. This provides an illustration of the different ways in which workplace bullying can be perceived, understood, and researched. Moreover, because alternative paradigmatic lenses draw upon varying theoretical and methodological approaches, paradigmatic analysis can offer a more complete and comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. The author uses these lenses to ground workplace bullying in paradigmatically driven theoretical frameworks, while using these theoretical frameworks to propose research questions that can direct us toward gaining a more composite body of scholarship.