Workplace Cyberbullying and Belief in Organisational Conspiracy Theories: The Serial Mediating Roles of Emotional Exhaustion and Organisational Cynicism

Abstract

This study examines how workplace cyberbullying contributes to employees’ belief in organisational conspiracy theories by testing the sequential mediating roles of emotional exhaustion and organisational cynicism. Guided by Conservation of Resources theory, we argue that workplace cyberbullying operates as a resource-depleting interpersonal stressor that drains employees’ emotional capacity, giving rise to emotional exhaustion as an immediate affective response. Drawing on Affective Events Theory, we further propose that this exhaustion shapes subsequent cognitive evaluations, predisposing employees toward organisational cynicism - an interpretation grounded in distrust and perceived violation of fairness norms. Consistent with Social Exchange Theory, such cynicism then fosters conspiratorial interpretations of organisational actions, increasing belief in organisational conspiracy theories. Data were collected using a two-wave time-lagged survey of 329 employees in India’s information technology sector. Confirmatory factor analysis conducted in AMOS version 26 supported the distinction among the study variables, and serial mediation analysis using the Hayes PROCESS macro (Version 4.3) with bootstrapping for SPSS (Version 26) showed that workplace cyberbullying significantly predicted belief in organisational conspiracy theories both directly and indirectly through emotional exhaustion and organisational cynicism. By articulating this affective–cognitive pathway, the findings extend the nomological network of workplace cyberbullying and underscore the importance of addressing cyberbullying to reduce mistrust, cynicism, and conspiracy-based interpretations within organisational settings.