Given that many incidents of workplace mistreatment are observed by other employees, engaging bystanders to help in these situations through intervention training is one promising prevention approach. An important first step is understanding employees’ experiences when witnessing mistreatment to determine the types of barriers that inhibit intervention. As such, this study examined such barriers using interpretive content analysis, drawing on data from a larger Qualtrics panel study conducted in June 2022 with employees throughout the United States about their observations of workplace mistreatment. For the current study, we analyzed write-in responses about bystander barriers from 446 participants who reported witnessing workplace mistreatment but did not think they could intervene. Our study builds upon bystander decisional models and used a socio-ecological lens for understanding how workplace bystander intervention is shaped by the individual’s interactions with others and their perceptions of the organizational climate and culture. Findings revealed five main themes related to bystander barriers: not viewing the situation as intervention-worthy, not viewing intervention as their responsibility, reluctance to be involved, feeling unable to intervene, and power-related obstacles.
(Publisher abstract provided.)