Recently, we have not been papers that are behind paywalls, but we felt this paper and the research it reports from Australia and Croatia were important enough to share. Bullying is a serious concern in Australian research and academia. It does serious harm and has a toxic effect on an institution’s research culture. Institutions need to take an approach that focuses on research culture and not just issue research policy and expect that will solve the problem.

urally resilient despite extensive policy regimes. This paper provides a framework for strategic culture change, to reduce the prevalence of bullying behaviour within higher education. While the adverse social impact upon staff provides an ethical rationale for instituting culture change, the organisational cost of bullying provides an additional incentive. The results of our higher education study that was based on academic staff within universities in Croatia and Australia indicated that despite well-engineered policy regimes, levels of bullying remained significantly high, with over one third of staff indicating recent experience of bullying behaviour at work. While staff indicated that a significant gap existed between the rhetoric and reality within the institutions studied, they also indicated actions that might effect cultural change. These options are presented within as a change management model, providing a framework to manage strategic culture change within higher education institutions.