Mobbing in banks : the role of gender and position on the process of mobbing in banks in Poland and Russia

Purpose: The main purpose of this paper is to determine the scale of mobbing in banks, in particular we seek to investigate who is the most frequently a mobber and who is most often affected by mobbing.

Approach/Methodology/Design: English and Polish literature from EBSCO, ProQuest, and Emerald databases were used to write the article. The methods that were used for the study were classification trees, the Mann-Whitney test, and descriptive statistics.

Findings: This paper presents the results of an empirical study of bank employees in Poland and Russia. The following hypotheses were adopted: 1. Superiors are more likely to be perpetrators of mobbing than employees at the same organizational structure level. 2. Women more often than men report that they are victims of mobbing. Both hypotheses were disconfirmed in the research. Indeed, it turned out that employees at a similar level were more likely to be guilty of mobbing and that men were more often victims of mobbing.

Practical Implications: The phenomenon of mobbing is poorly understood, especially in banks. We managed to identify the groups most exposed to mobbing. In these groups, anti-mobbing prevention should be implemented first.

Originality/Value: Banks are very reluctant to undertake any research cooperation. The obtained results shed new light on who is being mobbed in general and who is being mobbed in financial institutions. The contribution of this paper is also to propose a mobbing index, which takes into account not only the frequency of mobbing but also its quality aspects, i.e., the various types of mobbing.