Health and Risk Behaviors of Bystanders: An Integrative Theoretical Model of Bystanders' Reactions to Mistreatment

Workplace Bullying Seen from the Perspective of Bystanders: Effects on Engagement and Burnout, Mediating Role of Positive and Negative Affects

The first and original aim of this study was to measure the impact of workplace bullying (WB) seen from the perspective of the witnesses (bystanders) on the work engagement and the burnout of these bystanders. The second aim was to test the mediating roles of affects between WB seen from the perspective of bystanders and two resulting variables, bystanders' work engagement and bystanders' burnout. This study was conducted using self-administered questionnaires with WB bystanders (n = 222) from the Cameroonian health sector. The results indicated that positive and negative affects played mediating roles between WB as seen by witnesses and the two resulting variables, burnout and work engagement. This study offers new avenues for intervention on the issue of WB bystanders. In addition to prevention for victims, witnesses experiencing bullying as bystanders in Cameroon must be supported and accompanied by occupational health services, occupational and psychosocial risk prevention workers, psychologists, as well as human resources.

Moral Disengagement as a Self-Regulatory Cognitive Process of Transgressions: Psychometric Evidence of the Bandura Scale in Chilean Adolescents

Moral disengagement is a process of cognitive restructuring that allows individuals to disassociate from their internal moral standards and behave unethically without feeling distressed. It has been described as a key predictor of maladaptive behaviors (e.g., delinquency, aggression, and cyberbullying) and as a mediator between individual variables and unethical outcomes (e.g., empathy and aggression). We aimed to provide evidence of validity based on the internal structure, reliability, and correlations with other constructs of the most used instrument to measure disengagement from moral self-sanctions: Bandura's Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement Scale (MMDS). A non-probabilistic national sample of 528 Chilean adolescents from 14 to 18 years participated in the study. The results showed that the 10-item version of the MMDS had a unidimensional structure and good internal consistency. As expected, the MMDS-10 showed positive and medium correlations with abusive, violent antisocial, and delinquent behaviors and negative and medium associations with prosocial behavior and empathy. Additionally, moral disengagement fully mediated the relationship between empathy and violent antisocial behavior, supporting the hypothesis on moral disengagement as a self-regulatory cognitive process. The results confirm previous research, and the findings are discussed in terms of their implications for reducing the use of moral disengagement strategies in adolescence.