An empirical investigation of the relationship among forms of workplace mistreatment

Organizational researchers argue that workplace mistreatment scholarship is hampered because of the wide variety of constructs studied. To investigate this concern, we conducted an item-level analysis of the relationship among workplace mistreatment experiences to assess construct overlap. Employed students reported how similar 17 mistreatment experiences were to one another (i.e., from measures of sexual harassment, generalized harassment, and incivility) and subject matter experts indicated the degree to which each experience represented several dimensions including Buss's (1961) dimensions (i.e., verbal/physical, active/passive, and direct/indirect) and others (i.e., sexual/ nonsexual and intentional/accidental). Nonsexual forms of mistreatment (i.e., generalized harassment and incivility) were perceived similarly despite their different conceptual definitions, whereas sexual harassment experiences were relatively distinct. Implications of the findings are discussed.