A qualitative research on mobbing victim women employees who sued in the working life

Mobbing is intentional or unconcious assaultive actions and practices that are directed to one or more employees, which leads to sadness and sorrow on the target. Assaults amounting to mobbing can be both physical and psychological. The aim of this study is to investigate female employees subjected to mobbing behavior working in different sectors in İstanbul and Ankara with respect to how they were exposed to intimidation behavior, how they felt and affected as a result of mobbing behavior, and how they dealt with it. In the first part the concept of mobbing is explined. The research was carried out with volunteer participation of 24 female mobbing victims, who were reached by snowball method. All victims included in the study have already taken their mobbing cases to the court of law. In-depth interviews were conducted with the victims using an interview form. An open-ended unique interview form was prepared based on related literature The interview form consists of two parts. The first part includes demographic questions sucah as age, city, sector, educational status, position, working time and marital status. The second part consists of 22 structured open-ended questions, prepared according to "Negative Behavior Scale", "Leymann's Behavior Typology" and "Mobbing Scale". Based on the responses of the victims various themes were formed: mobbers, reasons for mobbing, physical violence, exposition to intimiditation, work motivation, bullying, secret control mechanism, intervention with private life, insulting work-sharing policies, coercion, limiting and harmful actions, time period of mobbing and health problems. The majority of mobbing victims stated that they were mobbed by their superiors, envied by their superiors and co-workers and verbally intimidated intensely in order to prevent them from showing succes at present or potentially in the future. In addition, they stated that they were coerced by means of offensive and deragatory actions, accused for all kinds of flaws, and experienced physical and psychological health problems due to defamation towards their private lives, families and integrity.