Explicit and implicit attitudes to workplace bullying

A/Prof Brian Cooper, A/Prof Ross Donohue and Prof Helen De Cieri, 2025

Workplace bullying is a complex social problem with serious costs and consequences for workers, employers and communities. Workplace bullying (WPB) costs Australian industry up to $36 billion per year and is associated with poor mental and physical health outcomes for targets of bullying. Research to date has largely assumed bullying is driven by deliberate and pre-meditated attitudes and behaviour. Associate Professor Brian Cooper, Associate Professor Ross Donohue and Professor Helen De Cieri from the Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) Research Team at the Monash Business School question this assumption.

This project forms one aspect of a broader research program looking at the antecedents and consequences of workplace violence and aggression. This study draws upon contemporary behavioural theories that highlight the importance of impulsive and automatic elements in human attitudes and behaviour. Leading dual-process theories postulate there are two aspects of attitudes, explicit (deliberate, controlled) and implicit (automatic, impulsive) that lead to behaviour. However, we know little about the implicit and explicit attitudes of those engaged in bullying behaviour. The WHS team’s study extends previous work, which has focused on the target of bullying, by looking at the attitudes of perpetrators.

The lack of adequate measures of WPB has been a substantial point of concern for researchers, managers and policymakers. A novel feature of the WHS team’s study is that it accommodates the possibility that those who are at risk of bullying (or workers who are already engaged in WPB) may be unable to identify their favourable attitudes to bullying due to unconscious bias. In addition, people may be unwilling to report their favourable attitudes to bullying due to social desirability bias, resulting from the sensitive nature of the behaviour.

To address this, the WHS team conducted a study to develop and validate two novel measures of implicit and explicit attitudes to bullying. In this study, they developed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) - to capture implicit attitudes towards bullying. The findings of their research are novel and challenge the existing “reasoned action” approach to understanding attitudes and behaviour.