Women Bullying Women (WBW) at Workplace:A Literature Review

Abstract

Gender in the workplace has been studied in the extant literature; however gender with respect to bullying at workplace has received comparatively scant attention, despite the fact that bullying has been directly correlated to gender and needs to be analyzed further and considered in a gendered frame (Simpson and Cohen, 2004). Reports on why women bully women are very limited but there are enough articles dedicated to why individuals bully other individuals in the workplace and why they choose certain individuals above others. When studying workplace bullying, the national context assumes high importance not only for understanding bullying behaviour but also for understanding the social context (Parker, 2014).

Workplace bullying, in the background of various contextual developments in India, has emerged as one of the major problems with the Indian workforce. The fact that women most often bully other women, remains under-researched and under-theorized, especially in the Indian context, though the phenomenon is reported to be present in India too (D'Cruz and Noronha, 2010), further necessitating the exploration of this phenomenon across the Indian workforce. This paper attempts to take a holistic view of research on WBW across the globe with a specific focus on India and explores the reason and nature of WBW in today's professional world.