Workplace Bullying and Long-Term Sickness Absence—A Five-Year Follow-Up Study of 2476 Employees Aged 31 to 60 Years in Germany

Abstract

Objectives: The aim was to investigate workplace bullying as a risk factor for five-year occurrence of long-term sickness absence (LTSA) in a representative cohort of employees in Ger-many. Methods: In the German Study on Mental Health at Work (S-MGA) (n = 2476), episodes of long-term sickness absence (LTSA) between baseline and follow-up were assessed in the follow-up in-terview. Workplace bullying was measured in the baseline interview using a hybrid approach, which combines the behavioural experience and self-labelling methods. Through binomial regressions, the association of baseline level of workplace bullying with first-episode LTSA during follow-up was estimated, adjusting for baseline age, gender, occupational level, smoking status and physical demands at work. Results: Severe bullying heightened the risk for LTSA by approximately 50% (Rate ratio—RR: 1.48, 95% Confidence interval—CI: 1.05; 2.19), while occasional bullying heightened the risk by 15% (RR: 1.15, CI: 0.85; 1.55). When excluding LTSA events occurring in the first 2 years, the associations between bullying and LTSA increased by approximately one third. Conclu-sions: Workplace bullying seems to be a risk factor for LTSA even when controlling for occupational level, smoking and physical demands at work and when taking possible reverse causality into ac-count. We suggest to investigate effects of LTSA in more settings, to distinguish between occasional and severe bullying and employ longer follow-up intervals.