Bullying at workplaces has received increased attention from the media (Beckford, 2008; Parker-Pope, 2008; Klein, 2008; Said, 2007). A recent survey in the UK showed that 56 percent of employees believe that they face serious problems in the workplace due to bullying (Beckford, 2008). Workplace bullying is a serious problem with huge costs attached to it in terms of loss of working days (BBC News, 2000).
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Given this, media hype about workplace bullying, and an expected rise in bullying rates in workplaces due to the present financial crisis (Beckford, 2008), the topic requires academic attention to ascertain the factors that induce such behavior in individuals. Hence, it is necessary to look at workplace bullying and the factors that lead an individual to consort to such aggressive behavior.
Workplace bullying has received commendable academic attention starting from early research on “mobbing” in Scandinavia, Germany, and Austria (Einarsen, The nature and causes of bullying, 1999; Leymann, 1990; Zapf, Knorz, & Kulla, On the relationship between mobbing factors, and job content, the social work environment and health outcomes , 1996; Niedl, 1996) and “bullying” in the UK and US (Keashly, 1998; Pearson, Andersson, & Wegner, 2001; Fox, Spector, & Miles, 2001; Neuman & Baron, 2003).
Prior research has concentrated on bullying from various perspectives: different types of ill-treatment and hostile behavior (Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf, & Cooper, 2003; Keashly, 1998; Pearson, Andersson, & Wegner, 2001), measure of occurrences of bullying (Zapf, Einarsen, Hoel, & Vartia, 2003) , attributes of bullies and the victims they target (Zapf, 1999), organizational and social factors that enable or encourage such behavior (Zapf, 1999; Vartia, 1996), bullying arising out of interpersonal conflict (Andersson & Pearson, 1999), adverse effect on victims of bullying (Zapf, Knorz, & Kulla, 1996), process of resolving bullying or conflict situations (Richards & Daley, 2003), and bullying induced by racial/ethnic dogmas (Foxa & Stallwortha, 2004).
The above brief review of researches shows that there has been little work done to portray the psychological profile of the bully as most concentrate on the effect a bully has on the psychology of the person who is bullied or on the situations that causes bullying or the kind of ill-treatments that is inflicted by a bully.
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