In a 2021 survey, the Workplace Bullying Institute found that 30% of an estimated 48.6 million American workers experienced workplace bullying (Namie, 2021). Across library workplaces, bullying is an acknowledged experience (Kim et al., 2018), and dysfunction and incivility have been established as common longitudinal issues in all library types (Henry et al., 2023). Unfortunately, bullying is often overlooked in libraries (Freedman & Vreven, 2016). Vocational awe and a prioritization of collegial relations can lead to a breakdown in communication and surface-level “solution” to workplace confrontations (Freedman, 2012; Motin, 2009). 

Knowing that bullying in libraries is a problem, the creators of this workshop wanted to find evidence-based solutions to create an intervention for librarians to help address this pervasive problem within the profession, however after a rigorous review of the literature, there were no relevant evidence-based studies available (Albro et al., 2023). The authors then turned to Nursing, which is another female dominated service profession with a strong evidence-based interventional research on bullying in the workplace, as the source for the evidence utilized in this workshop. 

This asynchronous, online workshop will begin by providing definitions and readings on workplace bullying to ensure a thorough understanding of the phenomenon. Videos, charts, and graphs will be included to provide further context and deeper understanding. This workshop will utilize cognitive rehearsal as the main approach as this has been proven to be very effective in the primary research in nursing intervention research on bullying in the workplace. Exercises employing cognitive rehearsal will be interspersed throughout the workshop to check your understanding and give you the opportunity to practice responses to common bullying scenarios. At the conclusion of the workshop, you will be given printable materials that you can use to reinforce what you’ve learned.

It is critical for leaders to be invested in combating workplace lateral violence, bullying, and mobbing. When library leaders are willfully blind to a problem like bullying, it allows it to become the norm in the workplace. Leaders set the tone for their organizations and ply a large role in their workplace culture, and without their investment in eliminating workplace bullying, mobbing, and lateral violence, intervention efforts are not able to be fully successful. This training will be focused on peer-to-peer bullying, but it is important to note that supervisors make up nearly 60% of library workplace bullying (Kim, Geary, and Bielefield, 2018). Leaders must hold themselves and one another accountable if they truly wish to see change in their organizations.

As noted above, there is currently a lack of research available on bullying interventions in the library workplace, and the creators of this workshop will be publishing results on this intervention in aims of resolving this lack. The creators greatly value your responses to the pre- and post- survey that accompanies this workshop and hope that you will consider participating in future research to help the creators refine and improve this research. This workshop is hopefully the first iteration for this approach to mitigate bullying in the library workplace. 

It is also critical that while there is growing documentation of the abuse and neglect of BIPOC Librarians thanks to the work of Kaetrena Davis Kendrick and other researchers, there is not enough interventional evidence currently available for the creators of these modules to create specific modules for BIPOC librarians, who suffer abuse and negative work experiences at a higher rate than their white colleagues. It is hoped that there might be enough data submitted through this workshop from BIPOC librarians to create such materials in the future. The creators hope that other librarians from other historically marginalized groups will submit their data through the pre- and post- surveys so that specialized materials can be created for all librarians who face additional burdens in the workplace.