Workplace mistreatment climate and potential employee and organizational outcomes: a meta-analytic review from the target's perspective

Abstract

This meta-analytic study summarizes relations between workplace mistreatment climate-MC (specific to incivility, aggression, and bullying) and potential outcomes. We define MC as individual or shared perceptions of organizational policies, procedures, and practices that deter interpersonal mistreatment. We located 35 studies reporting results with individual perceptions of MC (psychological MC) that yielded 36 independent samples comprising 91,950 employees. Through our meta-analyses, we found significant mean correlations between psychological MC and employee and organizational outcomes including mistreatment reduction effort (motivation and performance), mistreatment exposure, strains, and job attitudes. Moderator analyses revealed that the psychological MC-outcome relations were generally stronger for perceived civility climate than for perceived aggression-inhibition climate, and content contamination of existing climate scales accentuated the magnitude of the relations between psychological MC and some outcomes (mistreatment exposure and employee strains). Further, the magnitudes of the psychological MC-outcome relations were generally comparable across studies using dominant (i.e., most commonly used) and other climate scales, but for some focal relations, magnitudes varied with respect to cross-sectional versus prospective designs. The 4 studies that assessed MC at the unit-level had results largely consistent with those at the employee level.