Workplace Bullying

Description: What's workplace bullying?

(Based on Stale Einarson and Paul McCarthy)

Workplace bullying involves the repetitive, prolonged abuse of power. Unwelcome, unreasonable, escalating behaviours are aggressively directed at one or more workers and cause humiliation, offence, intimidation and distress. It places their health, well-being, safety and career at risk, interferes with job performance and creates a toxic working environment. Workplace bullying can attack anyone, in any career, at any level, within any organization, at any time.

Statistics:

About one in six people are bullied at work; in some industries the figure is higher, ranging from 25%, 50% to 97% (Duncan and Riley study).

Types of Bullying Behaviours:

According to experts Einarsen and Zapf there are five main types.

• Work related
• Personal attacks
• Social isolation
• Verbal threats
• Spreading rumours

Bullying can be:

Aggressive: Screams, threatens and blames is easily noticed.
Passive: Subtle, camoflaged, hard to identify, divisive, undermining.

The bullying behaviours continuum:

• Bantering
• Teasing
• Verbal abuse
• Blame
• Humiliation
• Personal and professional denigration
• Overt threats
• Harassment (e.g. racial, gender, sexual)
• Discrimination (e.g. age, gender, cultural, religious)
• Manipulation of job specifications
• Unrealistic workload
• Micro–management
• Cyber bullying or notes
• Professional and personal exclusion or isolation
• Sabotage career and financial status
• Whistleblower attack
• Blackmail
• Overt aggression / violence
• Criminal assault and murder

Some reasons why bullying occurs and why bullies get away with it:

• If you need to belong to a group, you're expected to follow the leader.
• If a leader wants everyone to treat others with respect and dignity, they create a co-operative, collaborative work climate.
• If the leader is a bully or condones bullying, everyone follows.
• Like the animal world, a tribe is threatened by vulnerable members. They remind them of their own fears and could handicap their survival. Thus people fear, reject and despise others who show vulnerability.
• Most people follow the majority. Few people have the guts to stand up and say 'this is not fair, you cannot treat another human being like this' (Refer Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo).
• People who challenge wrongdoing upset the system, which prefers to remain dysfunctional.
• People who show their anger and distress threaten bullies.
• Targets give their power to bullies when they think they're safe. Many don't act when they should because they believe that they will receive justice at work, when they won't. By the time they act, it is too late, they are injured or their organization fights back, fearing liability and exposure of incompetency.

What makes a target?

• Wrong place/wrong time.
• Has an unresolved dispute with the bully.
• Previous target leaves.
• Different to others.
• Shows vulnerability.
• Bully is a new manager.
• Conscientious, agreeable, quiet achiever.
• Bully is jealous or threatened.
• Inflame bully game by revealing distress eg 'doing nothing'.
• Whistle blow: mismanagement, malpractice, fraud.
• Inappropriate social skills- others bully as payback.
• Padlocked to the job and can't leave.
• Physical injury.
• Paralysed due to earlier traumas.
• Socially unassertive or avoid conflict.
• Support a colleague who is being bullied - you're next!
• You become an active trade union official.
• And many more...

What's the role of the Organization?

• Many organizations don't understand the connection between leadership and culture on staff wellbeing.
• They don't understand that bullying is a sign of interpersonal difficulties and therefore professional incompetence.
• They don't realise that bullying damages people and profits.
• They forget that work safety and well-being lead to improved performance and productivity!
• They don't confront change without bullying.
• They bully instead of dealing with conflict.
• They don't want to know about any interpersonal, work or safety difficulties.
• Their social capital audit and financial accountability is low.
• Their management skills are limited.
• Job descriptions can be inaccurate.
• They misuse nepotism and favouritism.
• They empower the "boys club" or "girls group" at the expense of others.
• Their staff training to develop social wellbeing is negligible.
• Their responsibility to respect each employee's perspective is restricted.
• They allow bullying to take the focus off other difficulties.
• They use bullying to disguise incompetence, fraud, malpractice or criminal behaviours.
• They allow others to bully and support bullying, including peers/bystanders/witnesses/onlookers and subordinates (upwards bullying).

Managers who bully or condone it:

• Lacks assertive leadership skills.
• Incompetent.
• Unconfident.
• Lacks respect and empathy for staff.
• Under pressure to achieve goals.
• Under threat to protect their job.
• Poor social survival skills.
• Mean, aggressive, or psychopathic.
• Abuse or use people instead of guiding them.
• Expected to bully to achieve.
• Believe it's OK to bully as long as the work is done.
• Empowered by their organization, because they seem to obtain good, short term results.
• Enabled by their organization to bully.
• They turn a blind eye to bullies because they're ignorant or it reflects badly upon employer to denigrate and dismiss them (until they're too hot to handle and then dismiss them.)
• Bully to remain in control or enable others to bully, creating a pattern for everyone else.

Who are the bullies?

Ken Rigby's research into school bullying reveals two types of bullies, the malicious and the non-malicious. The same types go to work. The secret is to remind ourselves that most people can bully or be bullied!

A. The serial bully:

• Psychopath, sociopath or anti-social personalty disorder.
• Bully instinctively.
• 1% of the population are psychopaths (less women).
• 3-5% have an anti-social personality disorder.
• Refer: Tim Field, John Clarke, Robert Hare.

B. Ordinary people:

• They bully under certain conditions, eg achieve goals, survive at work, promotion, impress their manager, avoid confrontation.
• There's limited research about ordinary bullies who theoretically do 94% of bullying.
• Most employees who bully don't realise that their toxic behaviours are harmful and humiliating.
• They don't wish to hurt targets consciously.
• Some experience real emotional distress when confronted.
• Some can be bullied and bully in turn.
• Most ordinary bullies don't realise that they achieve more by being respectful and fair than employing passive or aggressive power games.
• Some are set up as payback or manipulated to bully.

Few bullies are:

• Investigated from a historical perspective (previous bullying or previous jobs).
• Investigated from a systemic perspective (who else is being bullied by them at work).
• Have their performance appraisals compared to their staff relationships.
• Checked against witness reports or videotaped.
• Referred for a psychiatric/psychological referral (unlike their targets).

The impact of workplace bullying

The organization loses money
The loss to organizations has been calculated at between $AUD 17 and 36 billion for Australia, a relatively small population! (Workplace Bullying Project Team, Griffith's University (2001). Some examples:

• Lost productivity
• Bullies are inefficient
• Reduced motivation
• Poor team work
• Brain drain - good employees leave
• Employees waste time defending and protecting themselves
• Bystander fear and distress
• Frustration and apathy
• Negative public relations
• Expensive mistakes
• Can't identify fraud and unethical behaviours or waste resources disguising them
• Unnecessary administration, Workcover and other costs etc.

The economy as a whole also suffers.
This includes general community costs such as unemployment benefits, expensive mistakes (eg bullying leading to machinery breakdown) family breakdown, car accidents, illness, medical costs and hospital care.

How targets can be injured by workplace bullying?

Physical	Health issues Weight gain Cancer/ heart attacks Stress-induced illness Suicidal thinking
Intellectual	Concentration affected Reduced motivation Memory difficulties Difficulty learning new material
Emotional	Fear/ Panic attacks Anger Depression Anxiety disorders Loss of identity Severe/chronic posttraumatic stress disorder
Financial	Loss of income/career Loss of second job Loss of promotion Less superannuation Forced retirement
Social	Social difficulties Social isolation
Family and sex life	Separation/Divorce Lowered sex drive

How can the bully be affected?

• Become extremely upset, hurt and defensive.
• Hate being labelled a bully, ashamed at exposure, deny their behaviours.
• Wrongly blamed by a manipulative, over-sensitive target.
• Lack prosocial skills, becomes more aggressive and disruptive.
• Angry at being blamed for doing what they've always done or did unconsciously because they were under pressure or following company role models.
• May blame others, manipulate and lie to cover up their lack of expertise or productivity.
• Unfairly treated by a faulty dispute resolution system at work.
• Denied natural justice.
• Some bullies make it to the top of the ladder, hurting people on their way up. But sometimes they're toppled. Their bullying behaviours boomerangs back on them!
• Bullies' actions are becoming too expensive for some organizations to correct, they're less likely to be tolerated and protected in the future.
• Families may reject a bully's aggression and payback eg an expensive divorce.
• Many can't release their anger in healthy, assertive ways, (possibly Type A's) (may be more prone to heart attacks).

How do you prevent and reduce workplace bullying?

• Take responsibility and insure a safe workplace.
• Validate targets' concerns.
• Treat bully with respect.
• Use collaborative approaches to resolving differences not adversarial ones.
• Employ laws of natural justice.

Targets - bullying is bad - but you have options!!!