A SCOPING REVIEW OF THE EXPERIENCES OF WOMEN TO WOMEN BULLYING IN WORKSPACES abstract

ABSTRACT

Bullying, as an aggressive behaviour, introduces a power dynamic between two or more individuals that often brings about hostility between individuals, especially a lack of collegiality within the workspace. This has adverse ramifications for the people involved in this skewed work dynamics as not only the productivity is affected but there are consequent impacts on the mental health of the perpetrator and the victim alike. Within the conventional patriarchal constructs, women are most easily taken as the victims of violence (verbal or otherwise) and aggression perpetrated by men, which means that more concealed forms of aggression and hostility existing within the gender is never brought to the centre. However, there have been several instances of women-towomen bullying at the workplace and within the households, which has further marginalized their status and affected their ability to work peacefully and effectively. This paper is a rigorous and extensive scoping review of the literature on women-to-women bullying in workspaces. The review of the literature spans across a course of 20 years beginning from the years 2003 to 2023. The literature review method adheres to Joanna Briggs Institute’s (JBI) Manual for Evidence Synthesis and the PRISMA-P Guidelines for enhanced data selection and synthesis. The scoping review of the literature was restricted to only peer-reviewed journal articles as opposed to non-periodic publications and grey literature to ensure academic rigor. The review revealed that bullying at workspaces is an aggressive behaviour that results from complex power dynamics between employees. When the phenomenon of bullying is explored from a gendered lens, especially women to women bullying, it is evident that the status of women becomes even more vulnerable owing to the fear of being sidelined and overlooked by a fellow female colleague in a workspace that is generally dominated by male counterparts and male decision-makers. However, such findings cannot be generalized across educational status, varied socio-demographic profiles, nature of employment, and several other key denominators.