Status limbo: analysis of nurse faculty member reports of administrator response to workplace bullying complaints

Abstract

Increasing concern about bullying among adults in workplaces is notable internationally. Unlike blatant physical bullying, workplace bullying often involves bullies' dismissive, demeaning, and typically surreptitious, one-on-one communications with their intended victims. These communications challenge recognition when they are examined beyond the interpersonal margins of the bully-victim dyad. Thus, they tend to elude formal, administrative reproach, despite the negative, long-term outcomes they herald for workplace employees--those immediately involved as victims and those who are bystanders--and for employing organizations and the consumers they serve. This article offers a hermeneutic analysis of workplace bullying victims' narrative reports of administrator responses to their complaints of having been bullied at work. Analysis demonstrated respondent perceptions of the variability and unevenness of administrative responses to their reports and, more broadly, respondents' collective sense of administrative abandonment. That sense is characterized in this report as status limbo, a term employed by Facebook users to represent a state of perceived neglect and oblivion.

Keywords: Harassment; Leadership; Management; Qualitative; Workplace bullying.