Moral harassment on the workplace has been abundantly studied in the course of the last 15?years. Various research projects were able to better describe typical behaviors, consequences for the victims as well as the main risk factors conditioning the appearance of moral harassment. Today, research on this topic faces new challenges. We have selected three of these new challenges: to better understand the complexity of the processes at play in situations of moral harassment, to better identify the role of outside players such as the group of colleagues or hierarchical superiors and, finally, to better understand the link between conflict and harassment.
Our method is based on semi-direct interviews (number of interviews = 100) with individuals (n = 50) who view themselves as victims of moral harassment. For the analysis, we have used a process-based model, integrative and dynamic, which allows us to identify a set of processes characteristic of situations of harassment and to distinguish them from more conflict-based or victimization-based processes.
The socio-semantic analysis of the content of these interviews resulted in several findings which significantly advance our current knowledge of harassment. First, the victims more often describe interpersonal processes as based on conflict rather than victimization. Second, the study of the role played by the group and the organization with respect to the protagonists, demonstrate that they most often harm the victim either though hostility against the victim or through support toward the harasser. Yet, it appears that, in certain cases, the harassed individual is supported by the group and can even become its representative.
Moreover, five different profiles describing harassed individuals have been identified through this study, and demonstrate that the feeling of harassment can correspond to very different situations. Some profiles do include interpersonal victimization, which correspond to the classical views on harassment. In most cases though, the feeling of harassment does not originate from the nature of the interpersonal relationship, which appears more as conflict-based, but from the fact that the organization and/or the group supports the harasser. Depending on the case, the individuals appear either as victims of the interpersonal relationship and of the social environment (typical profile of a victim), as individuals who are in conflict with someone who is supported by the whole of part of the social environment, as individuals who, despite themselves, bear the social role of group representative even though they are in a situation of interpersonal victimization, or, more rarely as individuals victimized at the interpersonal level but supported by the social environment.
Finally, both theoretical and practical implications can be drawn from the discovery of the importance of group and organizational processes specifically linked to the harassment situation, as well as from the fact that processes based on conflicts and victimization intertwine with each other within a situation, defining very different victim profiles. On a theoretical level, the creation of a field dealing with ?pathogenic work relationships,? and within which moral harassment would be one phenomenon amongst others, would allow us to better outline the different types of problems and to avoid the use of ?moral harassment? as a generic term for all the sufferings linked to work relationships. The highlighting of the role of the group and organization towards the protagonists as well as the discovery of the different configurations in which the victims can find themselves helps explains the experiences described by numerous interviewees, the fact that the harassment situations they are facing often appear to them as conflict-based as well as the surprise of the people who see themselves designated?as harassers.