Abstract:

Mobbing can be understood in Czech terminology as the equivalent of bullying in the workplace. This is a serious phenomenon, which is negatively reflected in the quality of relationships in the workplace, its climate and atmosphere, and is reflected in an undesirable way in the experience and health of its actors, especially among the victims of bullying. It is obvious that mobbing is fundamentally reflected in the work performance of the participants and if it interferes with the school environment, it affects the professional role of the teacher and thus reduces the quality of his educational activities for the children. The prevalence of mobbing is greatly subject to the changing social conditions. The estimated prevalence of mobbing in selected European countries varies between 1 and 24.8%. The prevalence of mobbing is affected by the methods of estimation, which primarily include self-assessment, behavioural or combined indicators, or the latent cluster analysis.

The interest into the research of the phenomenon of mobbing in the school environment has become more and more important in recent years, but rather marginally, the proposed research is aimed to the environment of kindergarten teachers. Therefore, the aim of this article decided to focus on a group of kindergarten teachers and to find out what is the prevalence of bullying among these educators. A partial objective of the study was to identify the most frequent forms of mobbing in the monitored sample.

The research sample comprised a total of 369 respondents. The sample included kindergarten teachers, citizens of the Czech Republic, aged 21 to 68 years, who were employed at the time of data collection. The average age was 42.23 years (ME 42; SD 11.03). The average period of employment in the current position was 14.8 years. To identify the prevalence and forms of workplace bullying the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised was used as well as a status questionnaire.

According to stringent evaluation criteria, the highest prevalence of workplace bullying of 5.75% was determined by means of behavioural measurement; according to self-evaluation measurement the prevalence was 2.15%; the lowest prevalence of workplace bullying of 1.65% was obtained by combining the behavioural and self-evaluation measurements. The combined estimate in the present research is a group of employees who face frequent hostile acts in the workplace and at the same time identify themselves with the role of a victim. The combined estimate in the context of the NAQ-R provides a finer distinction of the core group of mobbed individuals from those who overrate this phenomenon.

Keywords:

workplace bullying, prevalence, NAQ-R, victimization