Exploring the fluid boundary between ‘legitimate performance management’ and ‘downward bullying’: an experimental approach

• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Author: Michael T. French,Andrew R. Timming,Di Fan
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12262

Exploring the fluid boundary between

‘legitimate performance management’and

‘downward bullying’: an experimental

approach

Andrew R. Timming, Michael T. French and Di Fan

ABSTRACT

Using an experimental design, this research examines the extent to which managers

and employees perceive management behaviours differently. Eight simulated

employment scenarios were presented to an aggregated sample of managers and

non-managerial employees (n= 435), and the respondents were asked to evaluate

the extent to which the behaviours depicted are seen as bullying. It was found that

employees are more likely than managers to perceive ‘legitimate performance

management’as bullying but also that managers are more likely than employees to

perceive more overt bullying as bullying per se. This divergence in perceptions

suggests that what constitutes bullying, ontologically speaking, depends on one’s

point of view and implies that reality is socially constructed. The research has

important implications for organisations and trade unions in the development of

bullying policies and procedures.

1 INTRODUCTION

The extent of disjuncture between subjective experience and objective reality is one of

the oldest and, as yet, still misunderstood debates in the social sciences. Perhaps no-

where is this disjuncture more evident than in the realm of employment studies, where

phenomena are always context sensitive (Edwards, 2005). There is no single reality of

work but rather a series of viewpoints stemming from the different stakeholders in the

employment relationship (Budd, 2011). Thus, the same behaviour may be experienced

one way by an employee and quite another by a manager. This perceptual distance

can cause serious methodological problems where only employees or managers serve

as the sole source of data in a study.

The aim of this experiment is to evaluate the extent to which independent samples

of managers (n= 208) and employees (n= 227), when presented with the exact same

❒Andrew R. Timming, Associate Professor of Human Resource Management, UWA Business School, 35

Stirling Hwy, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia, Michael T. French, Professor of Sociology and Health

Management and Policy, University of Miami, 1320 S Dixie Hwy, Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA and

Di Fan, Associate Professor of International Business, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy,

Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. Correspondence should be addressed to Andrew R. Timming, Associate

Professor of Human Resource Management, UWA Business School, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley, WA

6009, Australia.

Email: andrew.timming@uwa.edu.au

Industrial Relations Journal 50:4, 348–361

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd