NURSING FACULTY’S EXPERIENCE WITH DISRUPTIVE WORK ENVIRONMENTS: A MIXED METHOD STUDY OF THE PHENOMENON OF BULLYING BEHAVIORS AMONG NURSING FACULTY AND THEIR INTENT TO STAY IN ACADEME by KELLI PALMER SHUGART A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty in the Educational Leadership Program of Tift College of Education at Mercer University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Atlanta, Georgia 2017 © Kelli Palmer Shugart 2017 All Rights Reserved NURSING FACULTY’S EXPERIENCE WITH DISRUPTIVE WORK ENVIRONMENTS: A MIXED METHOD STUDY OF THE PHENOMENON OF BULLYING BEHAVIORS AMONG NURSING FACULTY AND THEIR INTENT TO STAY IN ACADEME By KELLI PALMER SHUGART Approved: Elaine M. Artman, Ed.D. Date Dissertation Committee Chair Robert L. Lawrence, Ph.D. Date Dissertation Committee Member Director of Doctoral, Educational Leadership Program Carol Isaac, Ph.D. Date Dissertation Committee Member J. Kevin Jenkins, Ed.D Date Chair, Educational Leadership Program James Barta, Ph.D. Date Dean, Tift College of Education DEDICATION First and foremost, I dedicate this work, with love, to my family. I want you to know that I realize that I did not take this journey alone and without your support I would not have finished. You suffered the highs and lows right alongside of me and your love and constant encouragement helped push me along. I thank you for never giving up on me and helping me see that the light at the end of the tunnel was something more than an on-coming train. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my thanks to the members of my dissertation committee: Dr. Elaine Artman (chair), Dr. Carol Isaacs, and Dr. Robert Lawrence. Thank you for your willingness to accept the responsibility of serving on my committee and for your knowledge, expertise, time, and patience. I truly appreciate the way you were able to unselfishly assist and encourage me in this process. I am most grateful to Dr. Artman for serving as my committee chair and for her extraordinary research knowledge, patience and understanding from the very beginning until the very end. You spent countless hours fostering my growth throughout this process and I am very grateful. Dr. Isaacs, I could not have done this without you. Your endless encouragement, research expertise and guidance have been invaluable, especially during times when I was uncertain of the next step. I sincerely appreciate the many hours you invested in guiding me through this journey. Dr. Mary O’Phelan, I offer my sincerest thanks for your advice and direction throughout this process. Your kind words and advice helped me stay focused during difficult times. I would also like to offer my gratitude to Dr. Tanya Sudia, I am very thankful to have had your assistance during the start of this journey. Your research knowledge and feedback were instrumental in helping me formulate the foundation for this dissertation. v Along this journey, there have been many other professional friends and colleagues who guided, pushed and encouraged me. I would like to thank Dr. Laura Kimble, Dr. Helen Hodges, and Dr. Susan Gunby, for your willingness to share your wealth of knowledge and precious time to help me whenever I needed assistance. Dr. Patty Troyan, Dr. Diane White, Jill Ray, Fran Kamp, Elaine Harris, and Grace Lewis thank you for your support and understanding during the time it has taken me to complete this dissertation. Each one of you played an important role that allowed me to pursue this goal and I thank you. I would like to acknowledge and thank my family who supported me, asked about my progress, and cheered me on throughout this long journey. This dissertation is dedicated to you. To Kim and JB, thank you for your love and encouragement, and offering to help whenever I needed it. To my dad, Ken, thank you for everything you did to help make my dream a possibility and for always being my personal cheerleader. To my mom, Nita (in heaven), thank you for instilling in me the importance of higher education and to never give up. You and Kim are my role models. To my husband, Henry, thank you for not only enduring my doctoral education but picking up all the slack at home so I could spend countless hours studying and writing this dissertation. To my daughter, Grace, thank you for understanding all the times when I was not available because I was working on school. I do hope that in the end I have inspired you to follow your dreams and to never give up even when things get difficult. “I am finally done!” vi LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Negative Acts Questionnaire Revisited: Bullying Subfactors and items Numbers ............................................................................................................ 50 2. Data Analysis by Question................................................................................ 59 3. Participant Nurse Educator Characteristics ...................................................... 66 4. Characteristics of Participant Nurse Educators’ Institutions ............................ 67 5. Participant Nurse Educators’ Professional Experiences: highest degree held, total years teaching, and total years at institution .................................... 69 6. Participant Nurse Educators’ Current Employment Status ............................... 70 7. Reliability, Mean, Standard Deviation, Mean, Range and Cronbach’s Alpha of Participants’ Bullying Subscales on the NAO-R ............................... 71 8. Nurse Educators’ Reported Frequency of Work Bullying Behaviors in Each Behavior Category ................................................................................... 72 9. Nurse Educators’ Responses to Items on the Personal Bullying Behaviors Subscale ............................................................................................................ 74 10. Nurse Educators’ Responses to Items on the Physical Bullying Behaviors Subscale ............................................................................................................ 75 11. Differences on NAO Scores by Intent To Stay or Not To Stay In Current Position ............................................................................................................. 76 12. Differences in NAO Scores by Intent To Stay or Not To Stay In Nursing Academe ........................................................................................................... 77 13. Description of Interview Participants ............................................................... 80 14. Themes and Subthemes Identified as Representative of the Faculty’s Experiences with Bullying Behaviors ............................................................... 85 15. Summary of Data Sources and Analysis of Each Research Question .......... 1182 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure ........................................................................................................................... Page 1 Conceptual Framework ......................................................................................5 2. Conceptual Description of Convergent Parallel Thematic Method .................. 46 viii ABSTRACT KELLI PALMER SHUGART NURSING FACULTY’S EXPERIENCE WITH DISRUPTIVE WORK ENVIRONMENTS: A MIXED METHOD STUDY OF THE PHENOMENON OF BULLYING BEHAVIORS AMONG NURSING FACULTY AND THEIR INTENT TO STAY IN ACADEME Under the direction of ELAINE M. ARTMAN, Ed.D Because of the limited research on the perceptions of nursing faculty on horizontal violence, this convergent mixed method study investigated the phenomenon of bullying behaviors among nursing faculty and the faculty’s intent to stay in academe following exposure to bullying. 300 nursing faculty members of the Nursing Educator Discussion list responded to a survey. The quantitative survey included demographics and the use of the NAQ-R, a two-page self-administered Likert-type questionnaire with constructs referring to work and personal related bullying as well as physically intimidating bullying. Participants who agreed to complete the survey were then invited to volunteer in the qualitative interview if they had been exposed to bullying behaviors by a peer. Twenty interviews were collected from these volunteers. The qualitative portion used Giorgi’s phenomenological method of analysis with interview data. Of the 300 completed surveys, descriptive and inferential statistics indicated some important findings. Finding indicated that overall bullying behaviors were low (x̅ =36, SD = 14.2) although work place bullying (x̅ =13.35, SD = 5.66) and personal bullying (x̅ =18.97, SD=8.01) had the greatest extent of bullying while physical bullying was the ix least reported type of bullying (x̅ =3.9, SD = 1.6). Results indicated that those who indicated their intent to not stay in their current position reported significantly greater bullying behaviors for the total NAQ-R, work bullying, personal bullying, and physical bullying subscales (p< .001). The majority (89%) reported working in smaller institutions with enrollment less than 20,000. Surprisingly only 15.7% held a PhD in nursing, doctorate in nursing, and nursing doctorate combined. More than one in five participants (21.7%) indicated total years in teaching 5 or fewer years and 41.7% of respondents reported teaching less than 10 years. These numbers possibly reflects the number of young nursing academics in a field where nurses reportedly “eat their young,” and may feel “ignored” by the more than 31% of those with 20 plus years of teaching experience. While the quantitative results illustrated