Eradicating Higher Education Staff Bullying: A Case Study of the Gap Between Policy Environments and Employee Realities

This article focuses on what action educational leaders can take to ameliorate bullying within higher education. Bullying has a significant impact on organizational performance, particularly in public and educational institutions. Eradicating such behavior has proved difficult and complex. Bullying is socially embedded and often well entrenched. Despite preventive action, bullying persists within most cultures. Few studies investigate the relationship between higher education bullying policy and employee realities. This article explores two such case studies in contrasting social environments. It examines the relations between policy formation, employee awareness, and organizational impact. The study focuses on the rhetoric and reality of preventing and ameliorating bullying in higher education. The study gathered sixty documents, one hundred forty surveys, and thirty interview responses to map, using SPSS and NVivo, the relations between policy, organizational penetration, and social impact. The findings were surprising. Despite policy interventions, more than a third of all staff experienced bullying with the adverse consequences for subsequent education delivery. The findings provide evidence that policy formation alone is insufficient. Bullying appears strongly associated with the “historical patterns of power” within higher educational settings. The article indicates that without managerial development and interaction, little will change, with significant implications for staff morale, turnover, and educational delivery.