THE EFFECTS OF WORKPLACE HARASSMENT ON CO-WORKER RELATIONSHIP AND WORK ENGAGEMENT: A DEVELOPING COUNTRY PERSPECTIVE

This study aims to examine the effects of workplace harassment on the relationship amongst co-workers and their work engagement. It is one of the few studies to explain the effects of workplace harassment in a developing country perspective. Specifically, this study introduces co-worker relationship as an endogenous factor for workplace harassment. It includes a total of 208 samples from Bangladesh of which 47% were female and 53% were male. IBM AMOS based Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to obtain the results using the latent factor approach. This study revealed that, the employees in Bangladesh have severe experiences of harassment in their workplace which negatively influences their relationship with co-workers and resulted in poor engagement in work. Given the mediating effect, maintaining through good co-worker relationship predicted less negative effect of workplace harassment on work engagement. It is also to worth that, 73% of the respondents reported that they were anyway harassed by their bosses and other co-workers and 27% reported that they were harassed by their customers. This study contributes to literature and organizational practices by explaining an important state that helps us understand the underlying association between workplace harassment and interactions amongst co-workers and employment of personal selves in work.