Abstract

Workplace bullying may weaken the trust, psychological safety, and motivation necessary for effective performance. Resilience can help employees cope with adversity, but it should not be viewed as a replacement for organisational action against bullying. This study develops a context-specific framework linking workplace bullying, employee resilience, and task, contextual, and adaptive performance among employees of private universities in Haryana, India. It hypothesises that bullying will negatively affect performance, resilience will positively influence performance, and resilience will reduce—but not eliminate—the adverse effect of bullying. The “Resilience Buffer, Not Substitute” proposition suggests that resilient employees may sustain short-term output while still experiencing preventable personal and organisational costs. A time-lagged, multi-source survey design is proposed, incorporating validated bullying and resilience measures and employee performance ratings, ideally supplemented by supervisor assessments. The planned analysis includes reliability and validity testing, multilevel regression, and a bullying-by-resilience interaction test. As data collection has not commenced, the proposed relationships remain hypotheses. The study offers practical directions for accountable reporting systems, fair supervision, and healthier university workplaces.