The AIMSS Mobbing Scale<\/strong> (AIMSS M Scale) is a specialized psychometric instrument developed by S\u00fcmer et al. (2024) to evaluate the incidence, nature, and intensity of workplace mobbing\u2014defined as systematic, nonsexual, hostile, and unethical communication directed by one or more individuals toward an employee over an extended period. Created as part of the broader tripartite Workplace Mistreatment Project (AIMSS) alongside parallel measures for incivility and abusive supervision, the scale addresses the need for culturally contextualized yet internationally rigorous psychometric tools capable of isolating mobbing from adjacent forms of counterproductive interpersonal behavior. The scale comprises 18 self-report items administered with a 5-point Likert frequency response format spanning from 1 (Never<\/em>) to 5 (Almost every day<\/em>) referencing behaviors experienced over the preceding 12 months.<\/p>\n Psychometric evaluation in large cohorts of employed adults demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.96 in validation samples. Structural analyses utilizing both principal component analysis and robust confirmatory factor analysis support an essentially unidimensional overarching factor accounting for 53.4% of the total variance, with standardized factor loadings ranging from 0.56 to 0.84. Confirmatory factor analytic indices substantiated an acceptable model fit (Satorra-Bentler $\\chi^2(135) = 290.587$<\/span>, $p < 0.001$<\/span>; $\\chi^2\/\\text{df} = 2.15$<\/span>; $\\text{CFI} = 0.885$<\/span>; $\\text{TLI} = 0.870$<\/span>; $\\text{RMSEA} = 0.050$<\/span>, 90% CI [0.042, 0.058]; $\\text{SRMR} = 0.060$<\/span>). Construct validity was confirmed via convergence with established peer-victimization inventories, distinctiveness from lower-intensity incivility and hierarchical abusive supervision, and pronounced criterion-related associations with occupational burnout, emotional exhaustion, organizational cynicism, and diminished organizational commitment. The AIMSS Mobbing Scale serves as an empirical instrument for organizational psychologists, occupational health professionals, and workplace researchers.<\/p>\n workplace mobbing, workplace mistreatment, psychological harassment, hostile work environment, psychometrics, scale validation, counterproductive work behavior, occupational stress, burnout, organizational commitment<\/p>\n The AIMSS Mobbing Scale was developed and validated by a collaborative research team of industrial and organizational psychologists across multiple universities in Turkey:<\/p>\n Workplace mistreatment manifests along a wide spectrum of interpersonal deviance, ranging from low-intensity, ambiguous acts of rudeness to severe, targeted, and persistent psychological warfare. The primary purpose of the AIMSS Mobbing Scale is to provide a psychometrically sound, operationally clear measurement tool dedicated specifically to assessing workplace mobbing. While the organizational literature contains several instruments measuring general workplace bullying\u2014most notably the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R)\u2014researchers have frequently noted conceptual contamination and operational overlap among related constructs such as workplace incivility<\/a>, supervisor abuse, and horizontal harassment. The AIMSS initiative sought to systematically delineate these phenomena by developing three distinct yet coordinated scales (the tripartite AIMSS battery: Incivility, Mobbing, and Abusive Supervision).<\/p>\n The scale was engineered to capture systematic, hostile, and unethical nonsexual behaviors that an employee experiences repeatedly from colleagues, subordinates, or organizational leaders over a meaningful timeframe (the past year). In research contexts, the scale addresses gaps surrounding construct proliferation by establishing clear boundaries: whereas incivility involves low-intensity behaviors with ambiguous intent to harm, and abusive supervision focuses strictly on downward vertical abuse from direct hierarchical superiors, the AIMSS Mobbing Scale measures high-intensity, systematic interpersonal aggression that directly threatens the victim’s occupational standing, professional competence, communication access, social inclusion, and psychological safety.<\/p>\n In applied organizational development and occupational health diagnostics, the scale provides human resource managers, workplace investigators, and clinical consultants with an empirical method to quantify the prevalence of destructive group dynamics and institutionalized harassment. By measuring behaviors such as unfair performance downgrading, deliberate isolation, exclusion from corporate resources, and attacks on personal reputation, the instrument enables organizations to identify toxic department climates before they culminate in litigation, catastrophic productivity losses, severe psychiatric injuries, or voluntary turnover.<\/p>\n The construct measured by the AIMSS Mobbing Scale is workplace mobbing<\/strong>, conceptualized in organizational psychology and occupational ergonomics as a severe, escalated form of psychological victimization. First rigorously imported into adult work environments by Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann<\/a>, mobbing refers to hostile and unethical communication systematically directed by one or several individuals mainly toward one individual, pushing that person into a helpless and defenseless position and holding them there through recurring adverse interactions.<\/p>\n The AIMSS Mobbing Scale measures this construct across its primary operational behavioral manifestations:<\/p>\n Although these behavioral domains represent distinct facets of mobbing, factor-analytic evidence confirms that they function as an interconnected behavioral syndrome, justifying an overall composite mobbing score.<\/p>\n The construction and validation of the AIMSS Mobbing Scale are grounded in four primary theoretical frameworks within occupational stress, clinical psychopathology, and organizational behavior:<\/p>\n Leymann’s seminal conceptual model posits that mobbing is not merely an acute interpersonal dispute or a personality clash; it is an escalating social process where the target becomes systematically marginalized. Leymann identified five functional vectors of mobbing actions: effects on communication possibilities, maintenance of social contacts, personal reputation, occupational situation, and physical health. The AIMSS Mobbing Scale adapts this foundational typology into an empirically verifiable item pool, accounting for contemporary workplace dynamics such as digital workflow control, performance evaluation distortion, and arbitrary administrative rescheduling.<\/p>\n Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources (COR) theory<\/a> offers an explanatory paradigm for the psychological trauma caused by mobbing. COR theory asserts that individuals strive to acquire, retain, foster, and protect valued resources, including personal conditions (psychological safety, self-esteem), structural resources (corporate tools, adequate hours), and social resources (supportive colleague relations). Mobbing represents an aggressive, sustained resource loss cycle: targets expend immense emotional energy attempting to defend themselves, suffer direct structural deprivations (Item 15), and experience catastrophic resource depletion. Because resource loss is psychologically disproportionate to resource gain, sustained mobbing inevitably produces profound psychological strain, burnout, and behavioral withdrawal.<\/p>\n According to Weiss and Cropanzano’s Affective Events Theory<\/a>, discrete environmental work events trigger immediate emotional reactions, which accumulate over time to shape work attitudes (such as organizational commitment and job satisfaction) and affect-driven behaviors. The AIMSS Mobbing Scale measures recurring negative affective events (e.g., being mocked, insulted, or held to double standards). Under AET, the persistence of these negative episodes systematically supplants positive organizational experiences, producing persistent negative affective states (anger, anxiety, shame) that directly degrade organizational attachment and stimulate turnover intentions.<\/p>\n Within the Job Demands-Resources framework, mobbing operates as a chronic, malignant job demand that simultaneously strips the individual of foundational job resources (autonomy, supervisor support, colleague solidarity, role clarity). The systematic imbalance between excessive emotional demands and depleted coping resources leads directly to energy depletion, cognitive weariness, and physical health impairment.<\/p>\n The AIMSS Mobbing Scale was subjected to psychometric validation during its development (S\u00fcmer et al., 2024), utilizing data from Turkish working adults recruited across diverse industries and organizational tiers. The validation strategy combined construct validity, convergent and discriminant validity, and criterion-related predictive modeling.<\/p>\n Convergent validity was established by correlating the AIMSS Mobbing Scale with established, internationally recognized counterpart measures of workplace bullying and mistreatment, such as the Negative Acts Questionnaire. The scale demonstrated strong, statistically significant positive correlations ($r > 0.70$<\/span>) with corresponding peer-victimization constructs, confirming that it accurately reflects the broad domain of workplace aggression. Furthermore, item-total correlations across all 18 items were strong and positive, with values consistently exceeding the standard psychometric threshold of 0.50, demonstrating high construct coherence.<\/p>\n To confirm that the AIMSS M Scale does not conflate distinct mistreatment constructs, S\u00fcmer et al. (2024) assessed its discriminant validity relative to their simultaneously developed Incivility and Abusive Supervision scales. While moderately to strongly correlated\u2014as expected among constructs within the broader workplace mistreatment spectrum\u2014multitrait analyses and nested confirmatory factor modeling demonstrated that a three-factor model separating Incivility, Mobbing, and Abusive Supervision fit the empirical data significantly better than alternative one- or two-factor constrained models ($\\Delta\\chi^2$<\/span> tests significant at $p < 0.001$<\/span>). This confirms that the AIMSS Mobbing Scale specifically isolates severe, systematic harassment rather than general minor impoliteness or strictly vertical supervisor abuse.<\/p>\n Criterion-related validity was confirmed through structural equation modeling and regression analyses examining standard organizational strain indicators:<\/p>\n The AIMSS Mobbing Scale exhibits high internal consistency. In the scale development and validation sample reported by S\u00fcmer et al. (2024), the initial working adult sample yielded an overall internal consistency reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) of:<\/p>\n $$\\alpha = 0.96$$<\/span><\/p>\n This high coefficient reflects item homogeneity and confirms that the 18 items reliably capture a single, unified behavioral spectrum of mobbing experiences. Split-half reliability and composite reliability coefficients ($\\omega$<\/span>) similarly exceed the conventional 0.80 benchmark recommended for individual assessment, indicating low measurement error across the latent continuum. Standardized item loadings further confirm that every item contributes significantly to the core construct without evidence of item redundancy or problematic attenuation.<\/p>\n The structural dimensionality of the AIMSS Mobbing Scale was investigated through sequential exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic procedures.<\/p>\n During the initial scale reduction phase, exploratory principal component analysis was performed on the preliminary item pool. Eigenvalue inspection and scree plot examination revealed a dominant primary factor that accounted for 53.4% of the total variance<\/strong>. Factor loadings on this primary dimension were consistently high, ranging between 0.56 and 0.84<\/strong> across all items. This dominant single factor indicated that while mobbing manifests in various interpersonal and administrative behaviors (e.g., social isolation, performance manipulation, overt insults), these acts co-occur as part of a single, coherent pattern of victimization.<\/p>\n To validate the unidimensional factor structure, S\u00fcmer et al. (2024) conducted robust confirmatory factor analysis utilizing the Satorra-Bentler (SB) scaled chi-square estimation method to account for multivariate non-normality typical of low-frequency, high-severity behavioral events. The single-factor model specification yielded the following fit indices:<\/p>\n The standardized factor loadings in the confirmatory model were strong, ranging from 0.60 to 0.83<\/strong>, confirming that each item serves as an effective indicator of the latent mobbing construct. Although the incremental fit indices (CFI and TLI) fell slightly below the 0.90 benchmark\u2014a common occurrence in complex behavioral frequency scales with high item counts and varying base-rate distributions\u2014the absolute fit indices (RMSEA and SRMR) demonstrated good structural fit.<\/p>\n The complete specifications of the AIMSS Mobbing Scale are summarized below:<\/p>\n The AIMSS Mobbing Scale was published in 2024<\/strong>. The instrument is described in the following original source publication: The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied<\/em>, Volume 158, Issue 6, pages 428\u2013457 (https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/00223980.2024.2321881<\/a>).<\/p>\n Licensing and Academic Use:<\/strong> The scale was developed for academic and scientific inquiry. Non-commercial researchers and educators may use the instrument for research and educational purposes, provided full citation and attribution are given to the original authors (S\u00fcmer et al., 2024). Commercial applications, including proprietary corporate climate audits, executive coaching tools, or fee-based employee wellness assessments, require explicit written permission from the corresponding author, Prof. Dr. H. Canan S\u00fcmer (canan.sumer@ozyegin.edu.tr<\/a>), and the respective copyright holders.<\/p>\n Instructions:<\/strong> Below is a list of negative experiences that can happen in work settings. Thinking about the past year (12 months), please indicate how often you have been subjected to each behavior using the rating scale provided.<\/p>\n Response Scale:<\/strong><\/p>\n The AIMSS Mobbing Scale is an 18-item psychometric instrument developed by S\u00fcmer et al. (2024) to evaluate systematic, hostile, and unethical nonsexual workplace harassment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[101,13,306],"tags":[24908,10864,438,6,35,2161,24909],"class_list":["post-8333","psych_scale","type-psych_scale","status-publish","hentry","category-occupational-health","category-organizational-psychology","category-psychological-assessment","tag-aimss-mobbing-scale","tag-counterproductive-work-behavior","tag-occupational-stress","tag-psychometrics","tag-scale-validation","tag-workplace-bullying","tag-workplace-mobbing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/8333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/psych_scale"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/8333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Keywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
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Purpose<\/h2>\n
Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
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Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
1. Leymann’s Typology of Workplace Mobbing<\/h3>\n
2. Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory<\/h3>\n
3. Affective Events Theory (AET)<\/h3>\n
4. Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model<\/h3>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity<\/h3>\n
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Reliability<\/h2>\n
Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Principal Component Analysis (PCA)<\/h3>\n
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)<\/h3>\n
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Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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Items of the Scale<\/h2>\n
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