The Voices from Within: Exploring Collaboration, Competition and Coping Mechanisms among Female Employees in female-dominates workplace

Abstract

Workplace bullying among women remains an underexplored sociological phenomenon, particularly within female-dominated professional environments where gender similarity does not necessarily produce solidarity, support, or protection. This study aims to explore how female employees experience, interpret, and respond to workplace bullying, with particular attention to the dynamics of competition, interpersonal conflict, and coping mechanisms among social workers in a female-dominated workplace in Gauteng, South Africa. A qualitative phenomenological design was employed to examine participants’ lived experiences. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 10 purposively selected female employees and analysed thematically to identify recurring patterns in their accounts. The findings indicate that workplace bullying is experienced as both overt and subtle behaviour, including verbal confrontation, gossip, patronising treatment, exclusion, undermining, and misuse of organisational power. Participants perceived women as particularly vulnerable to bullying because of persistent gender stereotypes, internalised sexism, interpersonal competition, jealousy, and expectations surrounding women’s workplace and social roles. Coping responses varied from direct confrontation, boundary-setting, avoidance, and informal negotiation to reporting through supervisors, human resource channels, and employee support services. However, limited awareness and inconsistent use of formal mechanisms encouraged reliance on individual coping strategies, which sometimes intensified conflict or prolonged exposure to harm. The study’s novelty lies in conceptualising female-to-female workplace bullying as a relational and structural phenomenon shaped simultaneously by gendered expectations, competition, power relations, and organisational practices. The study recommends strengthening organisational awareness, standardising reporting and intervention mechanisms, and fostering gender solidarity and supportive workplace cultures. For sociology, the findings contribute to understanding how gendered power relations are reproduced within ostensibly gender-congruent workplaces and how employees negotiate, resist, and cope with these relations.