Premilla D'Cruz

Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad | IIM · Area of Organizational Behavior

On assuming office in 2014, India's BJP-led government initiated an ambitious plan to facilitate the ease of doing business, aiming to make India an attractive investment destination. Interview data from 20 trade union leaders and an expert and published data from ILO, government and trade union documents and newspaper archives reveal that, to adva...

Workplace bullying is a multi-faceted phenomenon whose various types - interpersonal bullying, depersonalized bullying, internal bullying, external bullying, face-to-face bullying, cyberbullying, compounded bullying, dual-locus bullying and hybrid bullying – are captured in the ‘varieties of workplace bullying’ framework. Though a multi-causal phen...

Compassion, an empathic dynamic response to suffering, is associated with kindness, care and support and provides key resources which facilitate connectedness, recovery and healing. Aligned with positive organizational scholarship, compassion at work promotes socially sustainable workforce management and results in employee thriving and organizatio...

This introduction, and the special issue on 'Contesting social responsibilities of business: Experiences in context' it frames, addresses the neglected question of the experience of contestation in the terrain of the social responsibilities of business. It re-conceptualises the social responsibilities of business by advancing research grounded in a...

Online crowdsourcing platforms have rapidly become a popular source of data collection. Despite the various advantages these platforms offer, there are substantial concerns regarding not only data validity issues, but also the ethical, societal, and global ramifications arising from the prevalent use of online crowdsourcing platforms. This paper se...

This paper reports a study of how the Indian IT industry navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. Agility emerged as the crucial determining factor aiding the industry's successful survival. IT orga-nisations' agility, facilitated by the state's response to the pandemic and by both their anticipation of the lockdown and their technological capabilities, he...

Purpose: According to the work environment hypothesis, and as documented by empirical evidence, organizational factors play a crucial role in the development of workplace bullying. However, to better understand and prevent bullying at work and establish sustainable, responsible and ethical workplaces, it is crucial to understand which organizationa...

In this editorial, we tell the story of how the Special Issue on Critical Perspectives in Work and Organizational Psychology (CWOP) came about, how it fits within the broader agenda of building a critical community within Work and Organizational Psychology, and how future research and thought may be inspired by the collection of critical papers rel...

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Technology, Megatrends and Work. Of all the profound changes...

Purpose Adapting a positive business ethics framework, the purpose of this paper is to offer a new perspective to manage bullying at work. Specifically, this paper reports an empirical study which examines how the good work of servant leadership may lower employees’ exposure to workplace bullying, with compassion as a mediator and social cynicism b...

Purpose: A central focus of research and literature on workplace bullying is the importance of explanatory factors such as individual dispositions (i.e., the vulnerability hypothesis) and work environment factors (i.e., the work environment hypothesis). Although several studies address the importance of the two approaches, as well as their individu...

This paper focusses on the experiences of Indian lesbians and gays (LGs) who are subjected to unethical acts of workplace bullying which get manifested through constant guesswork, comments and questioning about their sexual identity in the hostile Indian context. Given this, LG participants usually opt for secrecy and lead a double life, using ‘pas...

This chapter presents an international state-of-the-art literature review of abusive trolling experienced by workers in the creative and cultural industries (CCIs), bringing target experiences and organizational/ occupational perspectives to the forefront and contributing to the still-evolving understanding of troll-ing. The abusive trolling encoun...

Drawing from in-depth interviews of cleaners employed in the cleaning industry in India, the study examines the ongoing process of constructing a positive identity among dirty workers. Cleaners respond to the intense identity struggles emerging from caste stigma, dirty taint, and precarity by constructing ambivalent identities. Cleaners’ identity w...

Engaging Polanyi’s embeddedness–disembeddedness framework, this study explored the work experiences of Bhil children employed in Indian Bt cottonseed GPNs. The innovative visual technique of drawings followed by interviews was used. Migrant children, working under debt bondage, underwent greater exploitation and perennial and severe depersonalized...

It is argued that developing countries can now industrialise by inserting themselves into global production networks (GPNs), rather than by building their own value chains from scratch. The economic upgrading that would follow from such a move would result in social upgrading outcomes in terms of wages, benefits, freedom of association and collecti...

Alongside scholarly and societal dimensions of research impact, the meaningfulness of research, emerging from the link to context, is crucial. Authentic inclusion of Global South scholars based in the Global South aids these objectives.

It was presumed that globalization would contribute to strong economic growth in India, given the country’s favourable demographic transition. However, the growth rate of employment has lagged behind the economic growth rate. While this situation is likely to be exacerbated by the disruption arising from the wider dissemination of digital technolog...

This chapter presents a comparative study of Chinese and Indian freelancers who use the crowdsourcing platform Upwork. It examines (a) the extent to which online freelance work in developing economies represents ‘decent work’, and (b) how freelancers’ participation in the global digital platform economy can be understood through the lens not just o...

This book showcases empirical studies on workplace bullying from a range of Asian countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, UAE and Vietnam, and is the first-of-its-kind single academic project documenting workplace emotional abuse in the world’s largest con...

The culturalist thesis remains pertinent to the field of workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment despite the universal presence of the problem across the globe. Nonetheless, most insights into the phenomenon come from Western inquiries conducted on Caucasian samples in the developed world, underscoring their limited generalizability and...

Though workplace bullying is consistently seen as a violation of workplace dignity, this link, to date, has not been explored and substantiated. Moreover, while the field of workplace bullying increasingly recognizes its entwinement with identity-based harassment, the social category of sexual orientation has received limited attention. Further, In...

Precarity, marked by uncertainty, instability and insecurity, has become a significant feature of contemporary work and employment. This is particularly applicable to India, where 93% of the workforce is informal and engaged in precarious jobs, i.e., jobs marked by precarity. In the formal sector of India, precarity strongly resonates with the incr...

Though limited, the extant international literature on the interface between significant others, such as family and friends, and workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment is not restricted to cross-domain spillovers where significant others are indirect targets, but encompasses evidence of families as perpetrators as well as direct targets...

Though workplace bullying is an extreme social stressor that inflicts severe harm on targets, the latter deploy overt, covert, embodied, routine and formal resistance, either as single or joint strategies, to tackle the problem. This chapter, drawing on international literature rooted mainly in postpositivism, elaborates on the specific practices o...

This chapter discusses the role of leaders in regard to whistleblowing and workplace bullying with some examples from clinical practice. In whistleblowing research, the role of leaders has been described from the earliest literature, yet the focus on the dual role of leaders as both complaint recipients and whistleblowers themselves is rather new....

Dirty work is marked by the intersection of tainted work, marginalized social identities and difficult work environments characterized by precarity and sometimes obscure legal status of occupations. These multiple factors together make dirty workers vulnerable to workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment, which further exacerbates the dist...

Depersonalized bullying at work, evident in real and virtual forms across a range of industries in public, private and voluntary sectors in the formal and informal economy worldwide, represents the organizational level of analysis. Whereas the substantive area of workplace bullying focuses mainly on the interpersonal level of analysis, field-based...

This chapter provides new direction to the field of workplace bullying by recognizing the phenomenon as a multifaceted construct captured by D’Cruz and Noronha’s (2016) “varieties of workplace bullying” conceptualization. Encompassing three axes, namely, level of analysis, location of the source and form of mistreatment, workplace bullying could be...

We exist at a time when technology has revolutionized the way people work. It is now just as easy to communicate electronically with colleagues thousands of miles away as it is with a co-worker in the same building. While there are many advantages of information and communication technologies (ICTs), workplace cyberbullying channelled through ICTs...

This chapter introduces robotization to the field of workplace bullying. Presenting a radically new yet highly contemporary path, the chapter makes a unique contribution to the field of workplace bullying by underscoring the inevitability of widening the current focus on humans to include robots, thereby reflecting ongoing developments in the world...

Workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment unfolds as a process, usually recursive and escalating, that involves multiple actors and stakeholders. Through Section 1 of this volume, the antecedents and effects of workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment are detailed. Apart from discussing individual and organizational causative fac...

This volume embodies the twin purpose of highlighting topics beyond the purview of themes commonly associated with workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment and of presenting insights into those occupations, professions and sectors which either have received extensive research attention or hold a pronounced propensity to trigger workplace...

This volume captures themes and debates around elucidating and studying workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment. The chapters presented here underscore the complexities and nuances of the phenomenon and showcase the various techniques relevant to and concerns associated with researching it. Debates abound as to what workplace bullying, e...

The agenda of respectful workplaces is no more urgent than in the context of workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment. This becomes even more significant in the face of mistreatment linked to social identity and national culture. The chapters constituting Section 1 speak to the spectrum of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention undert...

This chapter presents an international state-of-the-art literature review of abusive trolling experienced by workers in the creative and cultural industries (CCIs), bringing target experiences and organizational/ occupational perspectives to the forefront and contributing to the still-evolving understanding of troll-ing. The abusive trolling encoun...

In this article, we shift the usual analytical attention of the GPN framework from lead firms to suppliers in the network and from production to IT services. Our focus is on how Indian IT suppliers embed in the Netherlands along the threefold characterization of societal, territorial and network embeddedness. We argue that Indian IT suppliers attem...

Increasing global competition has intensified the use of informal sector workforce worldwide. This phenomenon is true with regard to India, where 92% of the workers hold precarious jobs. Our study examines the dynamics of workplace dignity in the context of Indian security guards deployed as contract labour by private suppliers, recognising that se...

https://www.ipe-berlin.org/fileadmin/institut-ipe/Dokumente/Working_Papers/ipe_working_paper_134.pdf

The Indian industrial relations system is dominated by the state machinery which controls the process of conciliation, arbitration and adjudication. In this chapter, we focus on conciliation which, in the Indian context, means an effort to mediate between employers and employees. Over time, with fewer cases being mediated, there has been considerab...

Across the globe, the platform economy, comprising online and offline variants, engages freelancers as independent contractors, excluding them from employee status, thereby advancing precarity. Internationally, there are various initiatives to address the vulnerabilities of platform workers. Indian online freelancers hold mixed views about their pr...

There is increasing interest in bystanders to workplace bullying, including from human resource management (HRM) perspectives. This paper draws on literature from the fields of sexual harassment and helping behaviour to develop understanding of bystander action and inaction. Part of a project on workplace bullying, this study used online story-base...

Workplace bullying literature has focused mainly on actions of individual targets of mistreatment, undertaken to address the problem, and on analyses of the effectiveness of responses. Less attention has been paid to the efficacy of state regulation in establishing a climate of prevention as well as redress. We examine the role of the Dutch Working...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze cross-national and cross-cultural similarities and differences in perceptions and conceptualizations of workplace bullying among human resource professionals (HRPs). Particular emphasis was given to what kind of behaviors are considered as bullying in different countries and what criteria interviewe...

The agenda of respectful workplaces is no more urgent than in the context of workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment. This becomes even more significant in the face of mistreatment linked to social identity and national culture. The chapters constituting Section 1 speak to the spectrum of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention undert...

Workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment unfolds as a process, usually recursive and escalating, that involves multiple actors and stakeholders. Through Section 1 of this volume, the antecedents and effects of workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment are detailed. Apart from discussing individual and organizational causative fac...

As well as presenting the first empirical study on workplace bullying in the context of child labour, this chapter extends the substantive area through its focus on the agricultural sector, the rural economy and non-standard employment. Drawing on a larger multi-focus, multisource and mixed-method study, the chapter details the exploitation and abu...

The study of workplace bullying (WPB) in India dates back over a decade, rendering it an established area of inquiry. This chapter, using the lens of D’Cruz and Noronha’s (Res Emot Organ 12:409–444, 2016) varieties of workplace bullying, elaborates on the sociocultural underpinnings of the phenomenon in the subcontinent, drawing on the extant liter...

This chapter reports a pioneering study on workplace bullying in digital workplaces, taking the field in a new direction. In addition, it makes further contributions by providing insights on the interface between emotional abuse and the informal economy. Adopting van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology, targets’ lived experiences of bullying on onlin...

This chapter makes an original contribution to the substantive area by showing forgiveness as a new response which helps targets of workplace bullying overcome harm and experience healing. Forgiveness, as with the extant literature on identity work and resilience, is associated with targets’ sense of well-being. Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenolo...

This book, recognizing that workplace bullying is a significant employment relations and occupational health and safety problem in India which warrants urgent and holistic intervention, presents empirical studies examining contextual factors, antecedents, mediators, moderators, processes, outcomes and solutions, thereby deepening our understanding...

This chapter brings novel theoretical contributions that advance the concept of external bullying at work. Based on a hermeneutic phenomenological study aimed at understanding the lived experiences of beauty service workers employed in unisex salon chains in Bangalore, India, the present chapter examines customer abuse in the context of interactive...

Though workplace bullying is an extreme social stressor that inflicts severe harm on targets, the latter deploy overt, covert, embodied, routine and formal resistance, either as single or joint strategies, to tackle the problem. This chapter, drawing on international literature rooted mainly in postpositivism, elaborates on the specific practices o...

Indian IT firms often espouse an “open” work culture including flatter and flexible structures and privilege rationality, objectivity, merit and competence. This is often juxtaposed against the rigid authoritarian and hierarchical structure of traditional Indian workplaces. However, our in-depth qualitative interviews with 40 Dutch and Indian emplo...

With increasing global competition, firms are turning to outsourcing, and thereby making workers vulnerable to management exploitation of various kinds. This especially is the case of workers lower down the occupational hierarchy who face the indignities of poor working conditions such as insecure employment, capricious treatment and a lack of voic...

The aim of this study was to analyze Human Resource Professionals’ reflections on the prevention of and intervention in workplace bullying across different countries. More specifically, the study sought to identify what actions were, in the experience of human resource professionals, best to prevent and intervene in bullying and uncover organizatio...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze cross-national and cross-cultural similarities and differences in perceptions and conceptualizations of workplace bullying among human resource professionals (HRPs). Particular emphasis was given to what kind of behaviors are considered as bullying in different countries and what criteria interviewees...

Purpose The paper reports a study of targets’ experiences of cyberbullying on online labour markets/OLMs. In addition to highlighting the link between targets’ coping and power and control, the paper compares conventional and digital workplaces. Design/methodology/approach The method of critical hermeneutic phenomenology is used in the inquiry....

Purpose The paper reports a study of bullying on online labour markets/OLMs, highlighting how abuse unfolds in digital workplaces and depicting the trajectory of target resilience. Design/methodology/approach Adopting van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology, targets’ lived experiences of bullying on OLMs was explored. Data gathered from Indian fre...

We exist at a time when technology has revolutionized the way people work. It is now just as easy to communicate electronically with colleagues thousands of miles away as it is with a co-worker in the same building. While there are many advantages of information and communication technologies (ICTs), workplace cyberbullying channelled through ICTs...

This volume captures themes and debates around elucidating and studying workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment. The chapters presented here underscore the complexities and nuances of the phenomenon and showcase the various techniques relevant to and concerns associated with researching it. Debates abound as to what workplace bullying, e...

This volume embodies the twin purpose of highlighting topics beyond the purview of themes commonly associated with workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment and of presenting insights into those occupations, professions and sectors which either have received extensive research attention or hold a pronounced propensity to trigger workplace...

Online labour markets (OLMs) are new global workplaces that represent the latest wave of offshoring. Indians have a strong presence on OLMs, being freelancers on both international and national platforms, adding to the country’s large and growing informal workforce. Through a critical hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this chapter examines the...