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Workplace bullying is a prevalent and costly form of abuse influencing women's health. The purpose of this study is to expand knowledge of how women care for their health after experiencing workplace bullying and to explore variation in that process.

A qualitative feminist grounded theory method was used to study a community sample of 40 adult women across three Canadian provinces.

Experiencing workplace bullying causes a disruption in women's health and this was identified as the central problem for women in this study. Women address health disruption using a three‐stage process the authors named “managing disruption” that involves protecting, mobilizing, and rebuilding. Women's efforts to care for health which they define broadly as including control over their lives are influenced by formal and informal support and by personal factors such as past experiences, perception of employability, values and beliefs, and relationship patterns.

Longitudinal study would be useful to understand long‐term consequences and potentially helpful resolutions of workplace bullying. Whether men's perspectives on their experiences are similar could also be explored.

Increasing awareness of what workplace bullying is and how to manage it would contribute to diminishing its occurrence and its impact.

Women need support and resources from workplace and healthcare professionals when they have experienced workplace bullying.

Few studies have explored women's experiences of caring for health during and after bullying. Interestingly, women reported adopting more balanced perspectives on work and life after their bullying experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to extend awareness that workplace bullying impacts on the health of individuals both within and outside the workplace and that there are implications for workplace health management.

The paper contextualises the problem of workplace bullying and workplace health management and introduces the five articles in the special issue.

Workplace health management is becoming more prominent in some organizations and workplace health management, and a corporate culture based on partnership, trust and respect, offers considerable potential to move the agenda forward. Moreover, there appears to be a paucity of knowledge available as to how workplace health management strategies and programmes impact on organizational culture and assembling and sharing such a knowledge base could be a useful step.

Further research is required to extend the studies presented and to address workplace bullying from the perspective of workplace health management.

Research is required to explore the extent to which the potential of workplace health management programmes to impact positively on corporate approaches to bullying and harassment has been realised and how those programmes have influenced corporate culture.

A partnership approach to knowledge creation and sharing has the most potential for successful outcomes and accords closely with the inferred ideals of the Luxembourg Declaration for Workplace Health promotion.

The paper addresses a perceived gap in the literature linking workplace bullying to the impact on individual health and the implications for workplace health management.