Unraveling How Social Workers Recover from Workplace Bullying Through Rediscovering Self
Date
2020-01-21
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Abstract
Social workers are increasingly sharing stories about witnessing and experiencing the injustice of workplace bullying across varied practice environments. Inherent in many stories are themes of discrimination, trauma, betrayal, anger, shame, and loss. Workplace bullying is essentially an abuse of power within the workplace. In the current workplace bullying literature, there is a disproportionately high representation of quantitative studies that describe and measure the nature, scope and prevalence of workplace bullying and its impact on the physical health, emotional well-being, social relationships, and work performance of targets and bystanders. Although this repository is rich with descriptive knowledge, it lacks the voices and experiences of workplace bullying targets. The purpose of this dissertation study is to examine how social workers recover from WPB. Ecological systems theory and socialist feminist theory provide a theoretical framework to guide this research. By utilizing constructivist grounded theory methodology, 13 registered social workers with active membership with the Alberta College of Social Workers, Canada were interviewed by semi-structured open-ended questions about their experiences of workplace bullying recovery. Four key themes emerged from the data: awareness, responses, impacts and rediscovering self. The findings inform a unique description of workplace bullying recovery and have been adopted into a conceptual framework to illustrate the social processes of workplace bullying recovery. A discussion of key findings of this study along with recommendations for social work educators, professional social work regulatory associations and clinicians working with WPB targets conclude this dissertation.
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Bullying, Workplace Bullying, Social Workers, Recovery, Social Work, Workplace Bullying Recovery
Citation
Tanchak, S. L. (2020). Unraveling How Social Workers Recover from Workplace Bullying Through Rediscovering Self (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.