[Individual and environmental antecedents of mobbing]

The aim of the article is to present the most common risk factors of bullying at the workplace. In the relevant literature one can find two main classes of bullying risk factors: environmental and individual. The most important environmental predictors of bullying are negative social climate, ineffective social communication and poor work organization. Among individual risk factors of bullying the most frequently pointed are functional features, such as low level of assertiveness, lack of social skills, ineffective coping with difficult situations and the few relatively stable individual characteristics, like neuroticism, trait anxiety, hostility and aggression. Most authors underline the crucial role of environmental factors in the development of bullying, and the individual characteristics of persons involved in this pathological relation are usually seen as the modifiers of bullying process.