The Impact Of Witnessing Workplace Bullying On Helping Behaviors: The Mediating Role Of Empathy And The Moderating Role Of Past Workplace Bullying Experience

Nowadays,workplace bullying is an increasingly serious social problem.Many studies have shown that being bullied in the workplace can significantly increase employees’ psychological stress,thereby ultimately lowering organizational performance.However,existing researches pay more attention on the bullied and the bully,and less attention on bystanders.Thus,this field involves hidden mechanisms by which bystanders’ witnessing workplace bullying contributes to helping behavior that need to be further explored.To address this theoretical gap,we draw on the Affective Events Theory and hypothesize empathy strengthen the likelihood that bystanders will stand up when witnessing workplace bullying.We further assume that whether or not past workplace bullying and bullied experience determines how the bystanders’ witnessing workplace bullying affect empathy.To test the hypotheses in our model,we recruited 54 full-time Chinese workers in different industries through the authors’ alumni networks.The survey was conducted in two waves.In the first wave,participants were asked to complete a questionnaire,including demographic information(gender,age,education and tenure),past workplace bullying and bullied experience.In the second wave,participants reported daily witnessing workplace bullying,daily empathy and daily helping behavior for 10 working days.We examined our hypotheses with SPSS 22.0 and Mplus 7.4.Specifically,we applied descriptive statistics and reliability tests via SPSS 22.0 to analyze the data.At the same time,confirmatory factor analysis,bootstrap methods and the hierarchical linear model via Mplus 7.4 were used to analyze the moderated mediation model.Empirical results support our arguments that bystanders’ witnessing workplace bullying is positively related to helping behavior.Meanwhile,empathy serves as a mediator in the relationship between bystanders’ witnessing workplace bullying and helping behavior.Moreover,past workplace bullying experience moderates the relationship between bystanders’ witnessing workplace bullying and empathy.Specifically,when bystanders have more past workplace bullying experiences,the mediating effect of empathy in witnessing workplace bullying and helping behavior is not significant.When bystanders have less past experience of workplace bullying,empathy has a significant mediating effect in witnessing workplace bullying and helping behavior.Overall,this study contributes to the theoretical and empirical literature in the following ways.First,we extend previous studies on workplace bullying by demonstrating that bystanders play an important role.Second,our findings deepen our understanding of the helping behavior mechanism by examining the mediating role of empathy and the moderating effect of past workplace bullying experience under a general theoretical framework.Finally,our work uses the Affective Events Theory to build a comprehensive framework for understanding how to reduce workplace bullying,thus providing a uniquely generative framework for future research.