Foundational Framing: A Brief Literature Review on Workplace Bullying Research Topics

Workplace bullying research, or any social justice research, should be couched in a thorough literature review. Researchers must gain insight into the academic field in which their study is situated by reading the most current literature and analyzing the findings of previous studies, allowing them to build upon that field of knowledge. When considering workplace bullying, one can identify many sub-topics such as race, gender, cost, and power. Hence, this brief literature review offers a sample of topics for workplace bullying researchers and demonstrates how social justice researchers can consider a range of vantage points under a single topic. When one considers the demographics, research environment, historical context, and past research findings, one can forge a path to new knowledge that further extends the field. By using the literature review as a foundation in instrument development, the researcher is better poised to discover new and groundbreaking findings. Note, typically a literature review should revolve around the keywords in a research question. Though still built on empirical research, this literature review incorporates the workplace bullying topics across eight book chapters, the topics in this literature represent a larger body of work rather than reflecting on a single research question. Nonetheless, any literature review should extend past simple reporting, but offer the reader an analysis of theories and data in a specific field.