When Workplace Bullying Goes Online: Construction and validation of the Inventory of Cyberbullying Acts at Work (ICA-W)

With the rise of the new technologies, new forms of aggression have also emerged. In that respect, cyberbullying amongst youngsters has been the topic of contemporary research. This form of bullying is defined as aggression that intentionally and repeatedly takes place within an electronic context (Kowalski, Limber & Agatson, 2012). Despite the increased use of ICT’s at work and an impressive body of research on workplace bullying (Neall & Tuckey, 2014), studies in the work context have largely neglected its electronic counterpart. The purpose of the present paper is therefore to construct and validate a scale for measuring workplace cyberbullying. Combining the existing knowledge from studies on workplace bullying and cyberbullying amongst youngsters, we have constructed a list of cyberbullying acts at work. A web survey was distributed to four organizations from different sectors. The participants (N = 710) were asked to rate their exposure to the different negative cyber acts (e.g. hacking personal information), their exposure to different work stressors (e.g. workload and role ambiguity) and their subjective well-being. We first performed a cross-validation in which a random half of the sample was used for the EFA and the other half was used for the CFA. After omission of low loading items, EFA revealed a three-factor structure (i.e. ‘work related cyberbullying’, ‘person related cyberbullying’ and ‘intrusion’) and this was further confirmed by the CFA. Next, a SEM was performed on the whole sample to test different forms of validity (i.e. convergent, discriminant and predictive validity). The preliminary findings suggest that the scale has good psychometric properties. However, the third factor ‘intrusion’ could be supplemented with additional items, which is to be done in a second study. The construction of the Inventory of Cyberbullying Acts at Work (ICA-W) offers an avenue for further exploring this phenomenon in the work context.status: publishe