Confirming Coercion in Community Colleges: A Validated Instrument for Workplace Bullying at Two-Year Institutions (2014)

Community colleges are understudied when compared to four-year colleges and universities; additionally, workplace bullying is an understudied phenomenon. Therefore, in order to study workplace bullying in community college, I needed to create an original instrument. After conducting the four-year study in 2012 regarding workplace bullying in higher education for four-year colleges and universities, in 2016, I replicated the Bully in the Ivory Tower, which was for four-year colleges and universities [Hollis, Bully in the ivory tower: How aggression & incivility erode American higher education. Patricia Berkly LLC (2012)], and applied the same process to community colleges. For this study, I wanted to also examine the impact labor unions have on curtailing workplace bullying. In the resultant book, The Coercive Community College, (2016), I used Sidanius and Pratto’s [Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press (1999)] social dominance theory and Mithaug’s [Equal opportunity theory. Sage (1996)] equal opportunity theory. I also used public shaming theories from Kerfoot [Nursing Economics, 25(4): 233, 234, 227 (2007)] and Gilbert and Proctor [Clinical Psychology, 13, 353–379 (2006)]. To examine labor unions, I employed Dawkins’s [Journal of Business Ethics, 95, 129143 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/S10551-009-0342-3 ] social responsibility theory. The Cronbach’s Alpha process is presented step-by-step. The chapter continues with the dissemination procedures and the findings; then the actual instrument is presented. The findings resulted in a book, The Coercive Community College: Bullying and Its Costly Impact on the Mission to Serve Underrepresented Populations (2016). Often considered to be the baseline study on workplace bullying and community colleges, the community college book also addresses cyber bullying, students, and the impact on underrepresented populations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the book, conference presentations, and poster sessions that resulted from the study.