Narratives of Working Mothers Experiencing Workplace Bullying: Trauma Transferred to Young Children

• Published date: 01 April 2020
• Author: Kyung Eun Jahng
• Date: 01 April 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12402

K E JKyung Hee University

Narratives of Working Mothers Experiencing

Workplace Bullying: Trauma Transferred to

Young Children

Objective: To examine how workplace bullying

experienced by South Korean working mothers

is connected to the displacement of the mothers’

anger and anxiety onto their young children.

Background: Workplacebullying has become a

nationally and internationally recognized occu-

pational health and safety issue in recent years.

Despite an increasing number of working moth-

ers, there is no research on the relationship

between workplace bullying and working moth-

ers’ perception and experience in relation to

their children and parenting.

Method: Both purposive and snowball sam-

pling were used to recruit study participants,

who were 11 South Korean working moth-

ers with children 6years of age or younger.

Data collected from in-depth interviews were

analyzed thematically.

Results: First, the working mothers’ experi-

ences of workplace bullying involved relational

bullying and its costs, such as depression and

psychological burnout. Second, the working

mothers’ views of their children and parenting

were intensely negative; the mothers consid-

ered parenting to be “just more work.” Their

children were at greater risk of being socially

Department of Child and Family Studies, Kyung Hee Uni-

versity, 26 Kyunghee daero, Hoegi-dong, Dongdaemun-gu,

Seoul, South Korea (kjahng@khu.ac.kr).

Key Words: mother–child relations, qualitative research,

South Korean working mothers, spillover–crossovertheory,

workplace bullying.

and emotionally deprived due to problematic

parenting.

Conclusion: Workplace bullying adversely

affects victim mothers’ children via the spillover

effect between work and home.

Implications: Working mothers who raise

young children should be protected from work-

place bullying. Trainingprograms for employers

and managers and context-specic interventions

are essential to ensure a healthy organizational

culture.

Workplace bullying refers to recurring and “ha-

rassing, offending, socially excluding, or neg-

atively affecting” (Podsiadly & Gamina-Wilk,

2017, p. 43) behaviors among coworkers that are

enacted via power imbalances and are intended

to harm defenseless individuals within work

environments (Howell, 2016; Salin, 2003).

Workplace bullying includes all types of mis-

treatment, including intimidation, threats, and

humiliation, that occur repeatedly in a work

setting and results in physical, psychological,

or emotional harm to victims (Einarsen & Rak-

nes, 1997; Galanakia & Papalexandris, 2013;

Ovayolu, Ovayolu, & Karadag, 2014). It may

also appear in the form of exclusion, social

isolation, or discrimination (Einarsen, Hoel,

Zapf, & Cooper, 2003). Notably, it does not

usually involve physical violence but manifests

in subtle and insidious ways that may be more

difcult to detect than stereotypical bullying that

320Family Relations 69 (April 2020): 320–334

DOI:10.1111/fare.12402