Available online 21 March 2024

Author links open overlay panelHighlights•

Faculty-to-faculty bullying and incivility in nursing education harm the target, weaken the organization, and erode collegiality. Data analysis suggests these negative workplace behaviors continue to occur frequently.

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Using both the NAQ-R and the WICS captured a wealth of data that identifies an organization's hot spots.

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Identification of the commonly occurring behaviors and their prevalence enable targeted remediation efforts.

AbstractBackground

Faculty-to-faculty bullying and incivility in nursing education remain prevalent. The effects are harmful to individual faculty members, and they weaken the organization.

Aim

The study aimed to measure faculty perceptions of bullying and incivility within their organization and identify the most commonly occurring bullying behaviors and types of incivility. The survey instruments were the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R) and the Workplace Incivility/Civility Scale (WICS). This is the first known national study to use both.

Methods

The study used a convergent mixed-method design and a convenience sample.

Results

There were 1,417 responses from nursing faculty from every state and the territory of Guam. The most frequently occurring bullying behavior was being ignored, while the most frequent uncivil behavior was being interrupted. The incidence of faculty-to-faculty bullying and incivility was lower in this study than in previous studies. However, despite the slight decrease, verbatim responses in the qualitative portion of the study reveal that mean-spirited, petty, and vitriolic remarks occur frequently.

Section snippetsInstrumentation

Developed by Einarsen et al. (2009), the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R) aligns with their operationalization of bullying. The NAQ-R is the most frequently used questionnaire in bullying research and has been used in over 100 studies in 40 countries, with more than 40,000 respondents (Bergen Bullying Research Group, 2018; Makarem et al., 2018; Notelaers et al., 2019). The NAQ-R has 23 items, each describing negative acts considered bullying. Respondents indicate how often they have

Results

The sample included 1,417 nursing faculty members from every state in the United States and the territory of Guam. Consistent with reports expressing concerns about an aging nurse faculty (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2022; Bittner & Bechtel, 2017), only 17.1% of the respondents were younger than 40. The age range for the largest group of respondents was from 56 to 64 years old (n = 434). The majority, 58.91%, had 5 to 20 years of teaching experience, 19.82% had more than 20

Discussion and Implications

In Clark and associates’ landmark 2013 study and the follow-up 2021 study, respondents ranked their perceptions of uncivil behaviors and quantified how often they were targeted or had witnessed acts of workplace incivility (Clark et al., 2021, 2013). The behaviors respondents in the 2013 study encountered or experienced most frequently were resistance to change or an unwillingness to negotiate, failing to perform one's share of the workload, refusing to listen openly to communicate on

Conclusion

The results showed that the perceived severity of incivility and bullying is slightly lower than in previous studies. However, based on respondents’ comments, it is evident that faculty-to-faculty incivility and bullying remain widespread and significant problems. Moreover, this study reinforces the usefulness and validity of the WICS and the NAQ-R as those research tools make identifying problem behaviors and their prevalence possible. This study adds to the literature as both bullying

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Pamela K. Kemp: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Validation, Visualization, Writing initial draft, review, and editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The author has no conflicts of interest and did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Acknowledgments

This manuscript is based on portions of the author's dissertation research. The author gratefully acknowledges Dr. Kyna Shelley, her dissertation committee chairperson, for her assistance and contributions to the dissertation process, particularly the development of the study, data analysis, and document review. Additionally, the author acknowledges and appreciates Barbara Zeugner, Lauree Feldman, and Dr. Nora Steele for reviewing this manuscript.

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