Personality and Experience of Mobbing: Three Types of Mobbing and the Consequences at the Workplace

The study aims to investigate the relationship between neuroticism and types of mobbing. It also focuses on the interaction between three types of mobbing with employee attitudes and the role of person-organization fit in this relationship. Data was collected from 329 employees and proposed model was tested through Structural Equation Modelling. Study showed that employees high in neuroticism were more likely report person-related mobbing compared to the work related or physical mobbing. Moreover, as expected work-related mobbing was related to job satisfaction, life satisfaction and turnover intentions where person-organization fit was a mediator. By emphasizing the differences between types of mobbing, new perspectives on how to deal with mobbing at workplace will be explored. New interventions would be developed by focusing the differences between various mobbing experiences in the organizations.


INTRODUCTION
People at the workplace have to deal with many issues including negative interpersonal interactions that harm workers (Aquino & Lamertz, 2004). This phenomenon has been labelled with different concepts such as workplace harassment (Björkqvist, Österman & Hjelt-Back, 1994), workplace incivility (Cortina, Magley, Williams & Langhout, 2001), psychological terror (Leymann, 1990) and mobbing (Leymann, 1996) which are all describing negative behaviors toward another person at the workplace. In the literature, harassment, bullying and mobbing are used most frequently and interchangeably (Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf & Cooper, 2011). Mobbing has been described as harassing someone or as terrorizing others psychologically (Leymann, 1996). In recent years, mobbing research has attracted more attention since its damaging effects on both employees and the organization were found in various studies (e.g., Nielsen & Einarsen, 2012). According to the model by Zapf and Einarsen (2011) personality of the victim is one of the antecedents of mobbing and the various studies determined neuroticism as being the main personality trait related to the experience of mobbing (e.g., Bowling, Beehr, Bennett & Watson, 2010). The Negative Perceptions Mechanism (Neilsen & Knardahly, 2015) suggested that people high in neuroticism are more likely to perceive mobbing behaviors compared to people low in neuroticism. However, most of the studies have described mobbing as a single concept and rarely mentioned the differences between various types of mobbing experiences (Neall & Tuckey, 2014).
The aim of this study is twofold. First, it investigates the relationship between neuroticism and three types of mobbing experiences by using the framework of Einarsen, Hoel and Notelaers (2009) most widely used model in the mobbing literature (Nielsen, Notelaers & Einarsen, 2011). According to Einarsen et al. (2009), mobbing experiences can be related to three different kinds of behaviors labeled as work-related, person-related and physically intimidating behavior. Although all three include negative behaviors, differences exist among them. On the other hand, personality has been identified as one of the most important predictors of mobbing, especially neuroticism (e.g., Zapf & Einarsen, 2011). According to the studies, people who were high on neuroticism were more likely report mobbing or interpret their experiences as mobbing at the workplace (e.g., Bowling et al., 2010;Coyne, Seigne & Randall, 2000). However, the relationship between neuroticism and types of mobbing has seldom been investigated. The present study aims to fill this gap in the literature by examining the extent of differences between mobbing behaviors including work-related, personrelated and physical mobbing and their relationship with neuroticism.
Second the study focuses on the differences between types of mobbing experiences, and their relations with person-organization fit and employee attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction, life satisfaction and turnover intentions). Previous studies about the consequences of mobbing investigated topics such as individual health issues, well-being (e.g., Çiftçi & Öneren, 2013;Eid & Einarsen, 2013;Karsavuran & Kaya, 2017;Leymann, 1990;Nielsen, Glaso, Matthiesen) employee attitudes such as commitment or turnover intentions (e.g., Ertureten, Cemalcılar & Aycan, 2013), and organizational culture (e.g., Acar, Kıyak & Sine, 2014). However, it has not been investigated whether mobbing changes perceptions of fit at the workplace leads to low job satisfaction, low life satisfaction, and high turnover intentions. Moreover, mobbing which includes personal criticism, criticism about the work or physically intimidating behaviors would differ how much they change person-organization fit. Therefore, the study also aims to investigate the role of person-organization fit on the relation between mobbing and individual attitudes which is novel.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Einarsen (2000) defined mobbing as "situations where a worker, supervisor, or manager is systematically and repeatedly mistreated and victimized by fellow workers, subordinates, or superiors" (p.379). As studies about mobbing have used the term "harassing other people" in describing the concept, different types of mobbing behaviors can be differentiated. Einarsen (2000) developed the most widely known model of mobbing consists of person-related, work-related and physically intimidating behaviors (Einarsen et al., 2009). Although all three factors are describing mobbing behaviors, the focus of each behavior differs which has been rarely discussed in the literature. While work-related mobbing includes behaviors such as giving unreasonable deadlines of unmanageable workload, or assigning meaningless tasks; personrelated mobbing includes behaviors directly focusing on individuals such as making insulting remarks, teasing, persistent criticism, gossiping or spreading rumors (Einarsen et al., 2009). Therefore person-related mobbing is independent of work and more likely related to affect individuals' personally. On the other hand, physically intimidating behaviors includes direct physical behaviors, threats | 57 or actual abuse which makes the behavior more explicit also for the observers. This type of mobbing would be more overt to victims or observers at the workplace. Although some researchers mentioned the importance of studying the differences between various types of mobbing experiences (e.g., Hershcovis, 2011;Neall & Tuckey, 2014) only a few study (such as Trépanier, Fernet & Austin, 2015) have mentioned the differences among them. Studies confirmed that individuals can experience and report different types of mobbing at the workplace (e.g., Notelaers, Einarsen, De Witte & Vermunt, 2006;Salin, 2001).Also the outcomes of different types of mobbing behavior could be different (see in Trépanier et al., 2015). Therefore employees may experience different types of mobbing which, in turn are predictive for various outcomes which will be discussed below.

Personality and Mobbing:
One of the theories about the occurrence of mobbing is the Individual Dispositions Hypothesis (Zapf & Einarsen, 2011) which states individual characteristics such as personality traits can be potential antecedents of mobbing as a victim. In one perspective, Einarsen (2000) stated that personality influences how people experience situations at work. Studies showed that high negative affect, low self-esteem or low social competence can be related to being a victim of mobbing (e.g., Coyne et al., 2000); several studies they found a significant relationship especially between neuroticism and mobbing (e.g., Coyne et al.,2000;Matthiesen & Einarsen, 2001;Nielsen & Knardahl, 2015). One of the mechanisms that used to describe this relationship was the Negative Perceptions Mechanism (Neilsen & Knardahly, 2015). According to that perspective, certain individual traits are related to a lowered threshold for evaluating behaviors as harassing (Nielsen et al., 2011). For example, neurotic people are predisposed to experience more negative life events (Headey & Wearing,1989), they perceive themselves and their environment more negative, and hence their threshold for experiencing mobbing might be lower compared to non-neurotic people (Nielsen & Knardahl, 2015). In line with this assumption, studies also confirmed neuroticism as one of the predictors of mobbing (Matthiesen & Einarsen, 2001) however none of those studies examined the relation between neuroticism and different types of mobbing behaviors.
Neuroticism and self-esteem are conceptually related as both use the same concept "positivity of self-description" in their operational definitions (Judge, Erez, Bono,& Thoresen, 2002). People who are high in neuroticism tend to have more unfavorable opinions about themselves (Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988), they have more negative self-perception (Thomson, 2016), and low selfesteem (Jacobs, Szer & Roodenburg, 2012). Therefore they will be more sensitive to negative messages in the environment which includes personal information. Coyne, Smith-Lee Chong, Seigne, and Randall (2003) found in their study that 88% of the targets of mobbing have higher neuroticism and more likely experience difficulty in coping with especially personal criticism.
H1: Neuroticism will be positively associated with self-reported person-related mobbing but not with work-related mobbing and physically intimidating behaviors.

Mobbing and the outcomes at the workplace: Job satisfaction, life satisfaction and turnover intentions
Several theories have indicated that circumstances at the workplace are influential on work related outcomes. According to Job Characteristics theory, core job characteristics such as autonomy or feedback are important as they have a positive impact on employee outcomes such as job satisfaction and motivation (Oldham, 1996). Employees who experience negative behaviors from others will evaluate those behaviors as negative feedback about themselves. In line with these theoretical assumptions various studies have shown that mobbing is associated with job satisfaction, negative health consequences, turnover intentions, absenteeism, symptoms of anxiety, depression and burnout (Einarsen & Raknes, 1997;Nielsen & Einarsen, 2012;Yıldırım & Yıldırım, 2007). In most of the research, mobbing has been studied as one type of behavior however different mobbing behaviors can change the relationship between mobbing and its outcomes (Hershcovis, 2011). For example, person-related mobbing includes insulting remarks or teasing therefore it would directly focus on individuals. But, in work-related mobbing the focus would be more on tasks as the items include phrases such as monitoring someone's work, giving unreasonable deadlines for a task. Sometimes, people do not even perceive work-related mobbing as a type of mobbing (Archer, 1999). Therefore, it is important to differentiate the outcomes of types of mobbing behaviors. Although in previous studies, mobbing examined as one type of behavior and different mobbing behaviors have not been compared to each other; there are some clues in those studies showing possible differences among them (see in Einarsen, Raknes & Matthiesen, 1994). Because person-related mobbing and physically related mobbing focus more on individuals, they would be more related to life satisfaction, whereas work-related mobbing would be more related to job satisfaction and turnover intention as it includes work specific behaviors. H2: Work-related mobbing will be negatively associated with job satisfaction and positively associated with turnover intentions.
H3: Person-related mobbing and physically intimidating behavior will be negatively associated with life satisfaction.

Mobbing and person-organization fit: The role of fit in the relation between mobbing and employee attitudes
Person-organization fit is described as the compatibility between a person and the organization, where the person and the organization share similar characteristics (Kristof, 1996). One of the influential theories in the field of fit studies is the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) framework by Schneider (1987), which posits that "environments are a function of persons behaving in them" (p.438). This framework proposes that similar people are attracted to, selected by, and choose to remain in settings where the goals are similar to their own. However, when people believe they do not fit in the environment, attrition will result, or in other words, they will leave (Schneider, 1987). Although mobbing has not been studied in previous fit studies, it can be assumed that employees who perceive repetitive negative behaviors at the workplace they would have lower perceptions of fit and frustration would occur. ASA framework highlighted the importance of fit between personal expectations and organizational life for high job satisfaction which would also produce high life satisfaction.
According to Social Exchange theory (Blau, 1964), employees are unlikely to reciprocate positively if others at the workplace fail to fulfill their psychological and social needs. Given the importance of respect from others and by allowing employees to feel themselves valuable at the workplace, which will accommodate their psychological needs, an experience of mobbing would decrease employees' perception of fit with the organization. This study predicts that the experience of mobbing described with repetitive negative work-related behaviors at the workplace will be related to a lower perception of personorganization fit and it will have an influence on the attitudes. Because little is known about the processes underlying the relationship between mobbing and the outcomes at the workplace it is more important to examine the role of personorganization fit. By exploring this process specific interventions for negative behaviors would be possible to develop. H4: Person-organization fit will be a mediator between work-related mobbing and employee attitudes (job satisfaction, life satisfaction, turnover intentions).

Participants and Procedure
Total of 329 participants were completed the survey. Of these individuals, 177 were women (54%) and 152 were men (46%) with an average tenure of 5.5 years (SD=5.4) in their current organization. Mean age was 32.54 years (SD=9.13). Convenience sampling was used in this study. Participants who were working full-time in any organization were asked if they would like to participate in the research and they were asked to complete a paper-pencil version of the questionnaire. Before collecting the data, written informed consent were provided to the participants and they were informed about the aim of the study. Also they were informed that being a participant is completely based on volunteerism, no identity or identifying question will be asked, and the survey is completely anonymous and confidential. There was no incentive in the study and the data was used only for scientific purposes and analyzed anonymously.

Neuroticism
Neuroticism scale of Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised-Abbreviated Form (EPQR-A) (Francis, Brown & Philipchalk, 1992) standardized by Karancı, Dirik, and Yorulmaz, (2007) was used in the study. The scale consisted of 6 items either saying yes or no with the Cronbach's Alpha of .73. Some example items include, Are you a worrier? Do you often feel lonely?

Mobbing
Mobbing was measured by using Einarsen et al.
's Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R) with 22 items which were standardized by Aydın and Ocel (2009). Items were rated on a fivepoint Likert type scale (1= "never",5= daily) and consisted of three factors (work-related, personrelated and physically intimidating behaviors) with the Cronbach's Alpha of .84. Some of the exam items include, Having your opinions ignored; Repeated reminders of your errors or mistakes, Persistent criticism of your errors or mistakes.

Person-organization fit
It is defined as the congruence between one's values-personality and the values-personality of the organization, was measured with a five-item scale (Resick, Baltes & Shantz, 2007) with the Cronbach's Alpha of .89. Exam items include; I feel my values match or fit this organization and the current employees in this organization;I think the values and personality of this organization reflect my own values and personality.

Life satisfaction
Life satisfaction was assessed with the standardized form of (Yetim, 1993) "Satisfaction with Life Scale" (Diener, Emmons, Larsen & Griffin, 1985) including five items with the Cronbach's Alpha of .86 (e.g., I am satisfied with my life).

Job satisfaction
The five-item "Overall Job Satisfaction Scale" version of Brayfield and Rothe (1951) was used in this study with the Cronbach's Alpha of .81 (e.g., I am enthusiastic about my work).

Turnover Intentions
The three item scale by Cammann, Fichman, Jenkins, and Klesh (1979), standardized by Gül, Oktay and Gökçe (2008) was used to measure turnover intentions with the Cronbach's Alpha of .79. In addition participants were also asked to indicate their gender, age and organizational tenure.

RESULTS
Means, standard deviations, reliabilities, and interscale correlations for the measured variables are shown in Table 1. Before analyzing the data for the hypothesis a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted for the mobbing questionnaire with three factors by using SEM in AMOS 21.0.The CFA results indicated that all estimates fell within the acceptable range (χ²= 514.04, df= 196, χ² /df= 2.62, p=.00,GFI=.88,RMSEA=.07) especially according to the indexes of χ² /df and RMSEA showed the model has a good fit with the data.
Path analysis using AMOS 21.0 was used to test the model presented in Figure 1. The goodness of fit indices suggested that the data fits the tested model well (χ²= 19.60, df=10, χ² /df= 1.96, p=.03,GFI=.99,RMSEA=.05). The standardized path estimates are presented in Figure 1. An overview of path values indicated that only the direct path from neuroticism to person-related mobbing was significant which supports Hypothesis 1. The other two paths from neuroticism to workrelated mobbing and from neuroticism to physically intimidating mobbing were not significant.
The analysis showed that direct path from workrelated mobbing to job satisfaction was not significant (r= .09) but the direct path from workrelated mobbing to turnover intentions was significant (r= .16, p< .001). Therefore Hypothesis 2 was partially supported. In addition, the direct paths from person-related mobbing to life satisfaction (r= .01) and from physically intimidating mobbing to life satisfaction (r= -.09) were not significant. Therefore Hypothesis 3 was rejected.
On the other hand the direct path from work-related mobbing to person-organization fit (r= -.35) was significant. Moreover, direct paths from personorganization fit to job satisfaction (r= .51), life satisfaction (r= .31) and turnover intentions (r= -.25) were also significant. This result was consistent with the previous literature (e.g., Arthur, Bell, Villado & Doverspike, 2006) which supports the view that person-organization fit is an important predictor of employee attitudes.
Although the correlation between work-related mobbing and job satisfaction was significant (r=-.29, p=.000), in the model the path was not significant. The reason for not having significant path could be the impact of person-organization fit. The standardized path between person-organization fit and job satisfaction was .51, which is considered as a moderate effect. Therefore in the model personorganization fit was a mediator between workrelated mobbing and job satisfaction. Employees who reported higher work-related mobbing also perceive lower person-organization fit which leads to lower job satisfaction. In addition neuroticism has a significantly negatively related to personorganization fit, and life satisfaction which will be discussed in the following section . (Table 2)

DISCUSSION
The main purpose of this study was to test the relationship between neuroticism and three different types of mobbing behaviors. Moreover it is aimed to examine the relationships between types of mobbing behaviors with the person-organization fit, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and turnover intentions. Findings confirmed the prediction regarding the influence of neuroticism on the experience of person-related mobbing. Also consistent with Hershcovis (2011), the relationship between mobbing and work-related outcomes was different for types of mobbing.
In the present study, neuroticism associated with only person-related mobbing. In the literature, studies found a significant relationship between neuroticism and mobbing (e.g., Coyne et al., 2000;Matthiesen & Einarsen,2001). Although most of those studies have used the measure of Einarsen et al. (1994), mobbing was evaluated as a total score and different types of mobbing were not compared to each other. However previous literature has supported the idea that employees can differentiate types of mobbing. For example, work-related mobbing such as giving unreasonable deadlines of unmanageable workloads, or assigning meaningless tasks, is more likely to be reported by employees from professional positions compared to non-work related mobbing behaviors such as being ignored (Salin, 2001). It was also shown that in some Doruk Uysal Irak | 61 occupations and organizations certain negative acts -mostly work related negative behaviors-are expected as part of the culture and may not be considered as mobbing (Archer, 1999;Salin et al., 2018) and physical mobbing was least likely reported type of mobbing (Einarsen & Raknes, 1997). All mentioned studies have supported the idea that various types of mobbing can be perceived and differentiated by employees; however they were not compared in terms of their antecedents and consequences which would help us to develop new interventions for mobbing. As it was supported in this study neuroticism was a significant predictor of the only person related mobbing but not the other two types. As Coyne et al. (2003) found victims of mobbing were more likely to experience difficulty in coping with personal criticism and they are more suspicious of others. Especially person-related mobbing includes personal criticism such as repeated reminders of errors or mistakes, being exposed to allegations or sarcasm (Einarsen & Raknes, 1997). However it is more critical for how individuals perceive the situation. The Negative Acts Questionnaire asks employees about their experience of negative behaviors, so the subjective evaluation of negative behaviors determines the scores of mobbing for each individual. According to the results, employees who scored high in neuroticism were also more prone to perceive person-related mobbing compared to the others who scored low in neuroticism. This could be related to their intention to interpret even neutral stimuli negatively (Lanyon & Goodstein, 1997).
On the other hand, the relation between neuroticism and work-related mobbing and physically intimidating behaviors was not significant in this study. As discussed previously, work-related mobbing includes behaviors that are only job related and they do not often include any personal clues. Accordingly, this type of mobbing behaviors is rarely perceived as mobbing behaviors in some cultures or organizations (Archer, 1999). Employees can relate these behaviors to workload or business culture as there is less personal message in this type of negative behaviors. Last type of mobbing, physically intimidating behaviors are different from the other two types. This type of mobbing consisted of more overt abuse and can be perceived by victims regardless of their personality since it includes behaviors such as finger pointing, threats of violence or physical abuse. In conclusion, in the frame of the negative perceptions mechanism (Neilsen & Knardahly, 2015) people with higher neuroticism will perceive and report mobbing behaviors more frequently than others. However, since the different types of mobbing include different behaviors, neuroticism more likely influences perception of the person related clues which would increase perceptions about personrelated mobbing.
The second purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between three types of mobbing experiences with the person-organization fit, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and turnover intentions. Previous studies about the consequences of mobbing rarely focused on the differences between types of mobbing behaviors and the outcomes although differences among mobbing behaviors were mentioned (i.e., Hershcovis, 2011;Notelaers et al., 2006). In this study, results supported the hypothesis stating negative association between work-related mobbing and person-organization fit. Also the second hypothesis was partially supported proposing the associations between work-related mobbing, job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Although the correlation between work-related mobbing and job satisfaction was significant, in the model the direct path from work-related mobbing to job satisfaction was not significant. When the standardized path coefficients were examined, a medium size negative effect (-.35) was found between work-related mobbing and person-organization fit, and a large and positive effect (.51) (Kline, 1998) was found between the person-organization fit and job satisfaction. High perceived fit between personal expectations and organizational life leads to high job satisfaction which makes the interaction between a person and the environment much more important (Schneider, 1987). Study results confirmed that work-related mobbing was one of the predictors of personorganization fit, and its relation with job satisfaction was also mediated by person-organization fit. In previous studies it has been found that a personorganization fit was a mediator between supportive workplace climate and job satisfaction (e.g., Velez & Moradi, 2012) which was also supported in this study. On the other hand, work-related mobbing is a significant predictor of turnover intentions, similar as person-organization fit which was supported by the ASA framework, when people believe they do not fit in the environment they will leave. Although significant correlations were found between mobbing and life satisfaction, both personrelated mobbing and physically intimidating behaviors were not significant predictors of life satisfaction, while neuroticism and personorganization fit were significantly and directly related to life satisfaction in the model. People who are high in neuroticism also have low life satisfaction (e.g., Headey & Wearing, 1989) because they are high in pessimism (Daffern, Gilbert, Lee & Chu, 2015) which would have an influence on their well-being. Because neuroticism is an important predictor of well-being (Costa Jr & Mcrae, 1980), the impact of its influence on life satisfaction (path estimate was -.23) could be one of the reasons of not finding a significant path between mobbing and life satisfaction. On the other hand, previous studies found a significant relationship between mobbing and anxiety symptoms, depression, burnout, psychological distress, posttraumatic stress disorder (Neilsen & Einarsen, 2012). Mobbing was described as one of the most harmful stressors at the work (Hauge et al., 2010). However in the current study life satisfaction has been measured by using five items which were asking general well-being. Therefore the scale might not be too sensitive to reveal specific outcomes such as stress or anxiety. In the model all research variables were tested together, because neuroticism and person-organization fit (e.g., Assouline & Meir, 1987) are important predictors of life satisfaction, direct paths from different types of mobbing to life satisfaction were not found significant.

Strengths, Limitations and Future Research
Overall, findings of the present study suggest that (1) neuroticism is associated only with personrelated mobbing, (2) work-related mobbing is an important predictor of person-organization fit and (3) job satisfaction, life satisfaction and turnover intentions are outcomes of person-organization fit. This study contributes to the literature by filling the gap about the possible differences between the three types of mobbing behaviors. In the literature three types of mobbing behaviors were described separately however differences among their predictors and outcomes have rarely been studied. Findings of this study showed that neuroticism was related to only person-related mobbing. Thus, other possible predictor variables should be investigated in order to confirm the differences between the three types of mobbing behavior. For example, people who are high in conscientiousness may experience less work-related mobbing or organizational culture and work values might be important predictors of work-related mobbing. In addition, little was known about the processes underlying the relationship between mobbing and the outcomes at the workplace. With this study some initial findings discovered the role of personorganization fit in this relationship.
The current study has also some limitations. First, it was based on a cross-sectional design which makes it hard to make causal inferences. A second limitation is that the study used a self-report measure which raises the issue of common method variance that may have inflated the correlations. However, other methods such as observer ratings may equally be affected by some bias (Spector, 2006). More research is needed in order to validate the findings of this study and to examine separate predictors of different types of mobbing behaviors. Moreover, traits other than neuroticism should also be examined by using different types of mobbing behaviors. As it was mentioned by Archer (1999), if culture or organizational values are significant for perceptions of work-related mobbing, new studies | 63 should include organizational values and examine their relations with different types of mobbing.

Conclusion and Practical Implications
Interest in mobbing studies is comparatively rising as it has psychological, economic and legal consequences in several countries. Many organizations are trying to deal with the consequences of mobbing with new intervention programs or training for mobbing in organizations. However, in order to deal with mobbing successfully, it should be described and evaluated carefully. In other words, behaviors which are labeled as mobbing behaviors may have different focus (self, work, or direct physical) and how employees interpret those behaviors as negative behaviors might be related to personality. This study showed significant differences between types of mobbing behaviors which would be important for mobbing interventions. As the Negative Perceptions Mechanism (Neilsen & Knardahly, 2015) suggested high neuroticism increases reporting mobbing behaviors, therefore raising awareness about mobbing (Salin et al., 2018) may change the interpretation of those behaviors. In line with the results of the study, organizations should analyze the mobbing behavior related to specific dimensions and they may need to develop customized interventions or education programs for different types of mobbing. Neuroticism may have an influence on the experience of only person-related mobbing, so for the other types of mobbing possible sources should be examined carefully and unique interventions should be developed. Moreover it was shown that work-related mobbing is an important predictor of person-organization fit which is critical in determining organizational outcomes. Therefore perceptions of fit should also be considered when dealing with mobbing at the workplace.