Abstract

Workplace mistreatment has garnered increasing attention from scholars and so has calls for research on interventions to prevent or reduce this phenomenon. However, there has been a lack of broad systematic approaches to studying interventions and existing reviews on workplace mistreatment interventions have predominantly focused on workplace bullying and incivility in the healthcare sector. To address these gaps and set an agenda for future interventions research, our review focuses on interventions for all forms of mistreatment and across industries and organizations. We reviewed 40 intervention studies from 38 articles finding a wide variety of interventions for specific forms of workplace mistreatment, including incivility (n = 10), bullying (n = 8), (lateral) violence (n = 6), discrimination (n = 3), sexual harassment (n = 3), harassment (n = 1), ostracism (n = 2), and mistreatment in general (n = 1). The interventions range from policy changes and interactive workshops to in-person training programs, mindfulness workshops, and cognitive rehearsal sessions, and vary in duration, with some taking less than an hour and others extending over multi-day programs phased out over six months. In the end, we discuss our findings based on four types of interventions for workplace mistreatment, propose six key considerations for implementing effective interventions, and discuss potentially fruitful opportunities for advancing workplace mistreatment interventions scholarship.

Document Type

Journal Article

Date of Publication

1-1-2025

School

School of Business and Law

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Publisher

Springer

Identifier

Irene Elisabeth de Pater: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9578-9638

Comments

Leake, G., Amankwaa, A., & De Pater, I. E. (2025). Workplace mistreatment: A systematic review of interventions and future research agenda. Journal of Business Ethics. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-025-06058-x

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.1007/s10551-025-06058-x