About These Findings
This research examined how targets of workplace bullying make sense of their experiences—and how organizational culture, organizational response, and bystander behavior shape that process.
The findings below represent patterns that emerged across participants' stories. While each experience was unique, these themes appeared consistently.
The Primary Finding
Workplace bullying becomes harmful not just because it happens, but because of how organizations respond, the culture they create, and how bystanders act (or don't act).
The deepest harm participants described did not stem from the bully alone, but from institutional abandonment and the silence of others.
Jump to Finding
Key Findings
1 Organizational Culture Enables Bullying
Workplace bullying did not occur as an isolated interpersonal problem. Instead, it was embedded in broader organizational cultures that shaped how power, silence, and accountability operated.
Two cultural patterns emerged most consistently:
- Authoritative, "yes-man" cultures: Obedience was expected and questioning leadership was treated as disloyalty. Silence was rewarded and speaking up was punished.
- Clique-based, favoritism-driven cultures: Relationships mattered more than ethics or performance. People believed they could "get away with a lot of things" because they were well connected.
Key Insight
Fear replaced trust, loyalty replaced accountability, and power—rather than policy—determined outcomes. In these environments, bullying was not an anomaly; it was a predictable consequence of how the organization functioned.
2 Organizations Prioritize Self-Protection Over Care
When bullying surfaced, organizations consistently responded in ways that prioritized self-protection over care for employees.
Participants described HR departments, leadership teams, and formal reporting processes that existed on paper but did not function in practice. Complaints were dismissed, concerns were reframed, and individuals who spoke up were labeled as difficult or problematic.
When leaders instructed targets to "get along," reframed bullying as mutual conflict, enforced policies inconsistently, or prioritized institutional self-protection, they were not remaining neutral. Instead, they communicated powerful messages about whose experiences mattered, what kinds of harm were recognizable, and what risks accompanied speaking up.
Key Insight
Participants did not describe neutral systems that failed due to oversight. They described systems that closed ranks, protected managers, and prioritized stability, reputation, and risk management over human impact.
3 Epistemic Injustice: When Credibility Is Denied
Participants' experiences were consistently misrecognized by their organizations, and this misrecognition profoundly shaped how participants understood themselves.
Epistemic injustice refers to harms that occur when individuals are wronged specifically in their capacity as knowers:
- Testimonial injustice: When a person's credibility is unfairly discounted. Participants repeatedly described seeking help and being told that what they were experiencing was a "personality conflict," "miscommunication," or simply "drama."
- Hermeneutical injustice: When individuals lack shared interpretive resources to make sense of their experiences. Many participants lacked access to shared language or interpretive frameworks that would allow them to name what was happening as workplace bullying.
Many described feeling dismissed, doubted, or treated as overly sensitive. Organizational actors implicitly questioned whether participants' accounts were reliable, serious, or even legitimate. As a result, participants began to doubt themselves, wondering whether they were overreacting or misinterpreting what was happening.
Key Insight
Without validation, shared language, or credible recognition, participants internalized doubt, remained trapped longer in harmful environments, and experienced deeper psychological and professional consequences.
4 Institutional Abandonment: The Deepest Harm
The deepest harm participants described did not stem from the bully alone, but from institutional abandonment and the silence of others.
Being left alone—socially, emotionally, and professionally—produced what many described as moral injury: a profound rupture in trust, belonging, and faith in the organization.
Lack of support consistently surfaced as isolation, which participants described as one of the most devastating aspects of the experience. One participant reflected that being neither validated nor heard felt like having their "life force" drained. Others described social exclusion using language associated with physical injury or death—such as being "cast out," "thrown out," or "hitting the pavement"—to convey the loss of belonging at work.
Several participants said that the failure of leadership and the silence of others hurt more deeply than the bullying itself.
5 Bystander Support Is a Critical Buffer
Support from bystanders and personal networks played a critical role in shaping how deeply participants were harmed—even though such support rarely resolved the bullying itself.
Being seen, believed, and heard by coworkers, friends, or family did not stop the abuse, but it reduced the pain of carrying it alone.
- In the workplace: Coworkers who quietly acknowledged what was happening, checked in, or said "I see you" or "I believe you"
- Outside of work: Family members, friends, faith communities, or therapists who provided validation
Whether quiet or explicit, bystander support mattered. Even when it did not lead to intervention, it reduced isolation, buffered psychological harm, and helped participants maintain a sense of self when institutions failed to act.
Several participants also described participation in this research as a validating experience. Being listened to without judgment and having their experiences taken seriously offered a sense of recognition they had not received within their organizations.
Key Insight
Participants with little or no support were the ones who were hurt most deeply and for the longest time. Rather than merely buffering distress, informal support disrupted epistemic injustice and helped participants preserve their identity.
6 The Sensemaking Framework: A Theoretical Contribution
This research extends the sensemaking framework developed by Adams, Scarduzio, and Redden (2025) in their study of sexual harassment reporting. Organizations engage in sensegiving—shaping how harm is interpreted and understood—and sensebreaking—when targets' expectations about fairness, protection, or justice are confirmed or shattered.
Importantly, much of this sensegiving is unintentional and occurs through everyday interactions, silences, and contradictions between policy and practice.
By applying sensemaking, sensegiving, and sensebreaking to workplace bullying, this study extends a framework that has primarily been used to examine sexual harassment reporting. To the best of my knowledge, sensegiving and sensebreaking have not been systematically applied to workplace bullying as a way of examining how organizational responses, and everyday organizational practices, shape targets' interpretations of harm.
Finally, extending this framework shows that sensemaking, sensegiving, and sensebreaking are not only useful for explaining harm after it occurs, but for identifying pathways for prevention, intervention, and response. If bullying is sustained through sensegiving and reinforced through sensebreaking, then meaningful change requires altering how organizations construct meaning—before harm occurs, while it is unfolding, and after it is named.
Key Insight
Applying and extending sensemaking, sensegiving, and sensebreaking theory to workplace bullying shifts attention away from individual resilience or conflict management and toward organizational responsibility. It offers both theoretical clarity and practical direction for addressing workplace bullying in more ethical, accountable, and humane ways.
Theoretical Framework: Sensemaking
Sensemaking
The cognitive and emotional work targets do to understand what is happening. They ask: "What is happening to me?" "What does this mean about me?" "What kind of organization is this?"
Sensegiving
How organizations actively shape how employees interpret their experiences—through policies, leadership behavior, and cultural norms.
Sensebreaking
When an employee's fundamental assumptions about their workplace collapse—when expectations about fairness, protection, or justice are shattered.
Epistemic Injustice
Harms that occur when individuals are wronged in their capacity as knowers—when their credibility is unfairly discounted.
Explore the Interactive Model
See how different combinations of organizational response and bystander behavior lead to different outcomes for targets.