ArticleBMC psychology2025
Political climate and workplace cyberbullying perpetration: a multilevel moderated mediation model.
Article in BMC psychology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundIn the post-COVID-19 era, more work is being done online; more people are working remotely; and communication has shifted online. Increased concerns about workplace cyberbullying (WCB) have accompanied these changes in work, but the scholarly literature is limited in terms of understanding the characteristics of organizations and individual perpetrators that shape WCB behavior. Drawing upon social exchange theory and the literature on organizational politics, we proposed and tested a multilevel moderated mediation model to examine the cross-level direct and indirect relationships between political climate and WCB perpetration mediated through psychological contract violation, and we also investigated the moderating role of toxic online disinhibition in this process.
methodsWe collected multiphase and multilevel data from 416 white-collar employees nested within 30 organizations in the service sector in Islamabad, Pakistan. We used a multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) technique in Mplus to analyze the data.
resultsWe found a direct and positive cross-level relationship between political climate and WCB perpetration. Multilevel mediation analysis revealed that psychological contract violation mediates the cross-level relationship between political climate and WCB perpetration. Moreover, multilevel moderated mediation analysis suggested that the conditional cross-level indirect effect of political climate on WCB perpetration via psychological contract violation was stronger and significant at higher levels of toxic online disinhibition, whereas it was weaker and non-significant at lower levels of toxic online disinhibition.
conclusionStudies exploring the situational antecedents of WCB perpetration are scarce, particularly at the organizational level. We proposed and tested a multilevel model of WCB perpetration indicating that political climate leads individuals to engage in WCB perpetration directly as well as indirectly through its impact on psychological contract violation. We outline a number of practical implications and suggest future research directions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.