Engaging with the East: Showcasing Workplace Bullying in Asia

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 applicability to Eastern and Global South societies. Indeed, while the field of workplace bullying has been researched internationally for about 25 years, studies from Asia have been undertaken for a little over 10 years. Yet, deepening country-specific knowledge uniformly is especially important to inform and facilitate the design and execution of interventions customized to suit the context such that the (potential) effectiveness of action efforts is maximized. While the present volume focused on various countries in Asia is a step in this direction, the current chapter serves as a backdrop to the continent by providing an overview of the Asian context within which workplace bullying, emotional abuse and harassment unfold. The chapter juxtaposes Asia’s enormous diversity in terms of ethnicity, culture, history, political system, economy and climate vis-a-vis its fast-paced economic growth and contemporary global significance. In emphasizing the extremely complex sociocultural underpinnings of workplace bullying in Asia across the ‘varieties of workplace bullying’ conceptualization, the chapter provides a background to the much-needed Eastern perspective in the field.