Relationship Between Organizational Culture and Workplace Mobbing: A Critical and Comprehensive Review

Workplace mobbing has become one of the most damaging and psychologically destructive problems in modern organizational life. Yet the cultural conditions within organizations that create and sustain this phenomenon remain surprisingly underexplored. This article offers a theoretically grounded, critically minded review of the relationship between organizational culture and workplace mobbing, drawing on peer-reviewed literature published between 1990 and 2025. The study examines how specific cultural features—including power distance, hierarchical structures, organizational silence, ethical leadership, inclusive management, psychological safety, and corporate social responsibility—either create fertile ground for mobbing or help prevent it. The analysis reveals a striking point: the relationship between culture and mobbing is not simply a correlation. It is constitutive and runs in both directions. Toxic, hierarchical, and authoritarian organizational cultures create the conditions for mobbing to take root and flourish, while mobbing itself gradually corrodes the culture around it, producing a self-reinforcing downward spiral of dysfunction. At the same time, organizations that build ethical, participatory, inclusive, and transparent cultures tend to protect their people from mobbing. This review contributes to knowledge by synthesizing empirical findings across multiple sectors, offering critical commentary on the theoretical and methodological weaknesses in existing research, and proposing an integrative framework that connects cultural antecedents to mobbing outcomes. The article concludes with practical, evidence-based recommendations for organizational leaders, human resources professionals, and policymakers seeking to address workplace mobbing through genuine cultural transformation—not superficial policy change.