THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COPING STRATEGIES AND WORKPLACE BULLYING IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS

During the past 20 years, workplace bullying has become a widely discussed and examined issue. Workplace bullying is a subtle manifestation of disturbed relationships in the workplace and it is considered an extreme type of social stressor at work. Stress is a major problem in the teaching profession. It is related to work overload, lack of teaching staff, lack of coping strategies and a high turnover amongst the teachers. Rapid increase of stress in the elementary school teachers results in a high risk of incidence of workplace bullying. One of the options for prevention is to find suitable coping strategies. The research objective of this study was to determine the incidence of workplace bullying amongst elementary school teachers and to determine the relationship between coping strategies and the victims of bullying at the workplace in the Czech Republic. The survey was designed as a quantitative research. A questionnaire battery was used consisting of questionnaires NAQ-R (Negative Acts Questionnaire- Revised), evaluating the prevalence and the forms of workplace bullying and standardized questionnaire OSI-R (Inventory of occupational stress) which evaluates the emotional, cognitive stress management and the coping strategy (personal resources for coping with stress). The research sample consisted of 743 elementary school teachers from the Czech Republic, of whom 128 were men and 615 were women. The existence of a significant negative relationship was confirmed between the victims of workplace bullying and all coping strategies monitored - social support, relaxation, self-care, and rational / cognitive coping.