Workplace Bullying

How Bullying and Harassment Impacts Employees

Bullying is recognized as a negative part of modern workplaces with long-term harmful effects for both the bullied individuals as well as their workplace. All workplaces have successful authority figures who can feel invulnerable in their status, popularity, power, prestige, and privilege. These “bully bosses” may manipulate others to further their own goals and they marshal support from co-workers against victims when they feel threatened.

Along with unwanted physical contact, workplace bullying can be any acts or comments that intend to intimidate, offend, degrade, or humiliate the targeted victim.

Workplace bullying is thus defined as repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more employees (the victims) by one or more perpetrators who are also employees and have some type of power over the victims. “Bullying involves a desire to hurt + hurtful action + power imbalance + (typically) repetitive aggressor and a sense of being oppressed by the victim”.

The power imbalance can be direct, such as when the bully is a supervisor (i.e., the bully boss) or indirect, such as when a clique of coworkers excludes the victim from communications, opportunities, projects, or workplace relationships. Workplace bullying behaviors often include shifting opinions, overruling the victim’s decisions, professionally attacking the victim in private or in public, flaunting one’s status and power, exerting excessive monitoring, unfair criticism, judging work unfairly, blocking someone’s promotion, ignoring the victim, or not returning phone calls, memos, and emails in order to sabotage the victim’s work projects.

Workplace bullying is predominantly characterized by verbal abuse, work interference or sabotage, harassment, and discrimination. Physical abuse in the workplace is much less common and would manifest mostly as sexual harassment. The most important thematic connection is abuse of power through aggression.

Harassment (defined as systematic and sustained actions that include making threats and demands; creating a hostile work situation, and/or advancing unwelcome verbal or physical conduct) and discrimination are special categories within workplace bullying because state and federal civil rights laws protect specific vulnerable minority groups from maltreatment. Civil rights laws protect members of a protected status group (i.e., females, minority groups based on race, age, disability, national origin, religion) if the perpetrator was not also a member of the protected group. In these cases, the Human Relations department of an agency or organization must investigate if a harassment complaint is filed and anti-discrimination procedures codified by state and federal laws must be followed.

One-fifth of adult Americans (19%) said they directly experienced abusive conduct at work – currently (9%) or earlier in their work life but not in the last year (10%). An additional 15% of respondents saw workplace bullying happen to others or knew about it happening to others (4%). Generalizing this random sample to the United States labor force of 161,616,000 individuals gives an estimated prevalence of approximately 30 million American workers having been, or are now being, bullied at work. Another 30 million have witnessed it. Sixty million American workers who have experienced or witnessed workplace bullying is roughly equivalent to the combined total populations of California, Oregon, Washington state, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah.

According to the National Boss Day Report, in 2012, employers paid over $356 million for workplace harassment and discrimination complaints (http://blog.ebosswatch.com/2012/10/national-boss-day-reportemployers-paid-over-356-million-for-workplace-harassment-and-discrimination-complaints/). The largest sexual harassment jury award in 2012 totaled $168 million. Michigan State University had to pay out $500 million in settlement to victims of Larry Nassar (i.e., sexual abuse of young athletes under his care). Employers have to invest time, energy, and resources from business activities to legal representation, settlements, litigation, court awards, and often pay legal fees and damages. Meanwhile, victims suffer mental, physical, and economic harm that is often not covered by settlements. Bullying victims often lose their jobs, accrue serious economic consequences, and suffer from damaged career trajectories.

Similar to school-based bullying, workplace bullying is: 1) driven by perpetrators’ need for power and to control the targeted individual(s); 2) initiated by bullies who select their targets, timing, location, and methods;3) characterized by acts of commission (doing mean acts to others) or omission (withholding resources from others); 4) damages the victims, particularly because of humiliation, exclusion, and repetition of toxic behavior over time;and 5) commonly escalates to involve others who side with the bully, either voluntarily or through coercion (i.e., negative bystanders).

According to WBI research by Namie and Namie (N.D.)

• 61% of Americans are aware of abusive conduct in the workplace
• 70% of perpetrators are men; 60% of targets are women
• Hispanics are the most frequently bullied race
• 61% of bullies are bosses, the majority (63%) operate alone
• 40% of bullied targets are believed to suffer adverse health effects
• 29% of targets remain silent about their experiences
• 71% of employer reactions are harmful to targets
• 60% of coworker reactions are harmful to targets
• To stop it, 65% of targets lose their original jobs
• 46% report worsening of work relationships, post-Trump election

Workplace bullies use their cognitive empathy and perspective-taking to understand the situations of others; however, they use this information to advance their own plans rather than to respond with affective empathy. Cognitive empathy refers specifically to the ability to identify and understand the emotional state of others while affective empathy relates to the ability to give the correct emotional response to others’ emotions.

Humiliation and social exclusion at work similarly trigger depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, PTSD symptoms, and biological chronic stress responses. According to a 2007 WBI survey, 45% of individuals targeted at work suffer from stress-related health problems. Chronic or extreme distress from victimization releases glucocorticoids, such as cortisol, and other hormones, such as adrenaline, that flood the brain and body. Prolonged exposure to stress response hormones can impair brain processes responsible for memory, emotional regulation, and the ability to sustain positive social relationships, as well as increase the risk for: heart disease, hypertension, strokes, immune system impairment, fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, colitis, diabetes, and skin disorders.

In many ways, the experience of workplace bullying parallels both child maltreatment and domestic violence. The bully boss or co-worker inflicts pain and suffering, especially emotional abuse, on an intermittent schedule when and where she or he chooses. This keeps the victim under chronic stress, hypervigilant, and off balance because it is unclear when the next bullying attack will happen. Work plays a central part in adult identity, leaving people victimized at work to feel that their world is seriously threatened.

Harassment and bullying are more likely to occur in workplaces that are homogenous and lacking diversity.

Workplace bullying is often covertly accepted by management and directed toward a victim who is unable to defend himself or herself because of his or her lower position in the organization

According to the 2017 WBI U.S. Workplace Bullying Survey results, in response to complaints of bullying, 25% of employers did nothing, 46% did a “sham” investigation, 23% helped the target, and only 6% punished the perpetrator. This lethargic response is understandable considering that 61% of bullies were bosses protected by power and status while 33% of bullies were coworkers. Considering these fixed roles and power imbalance, bully bosses can use their authority to allocate work, assess work, and provide feedback (even unwarranted, critical, and demeaning feedback) to the victim with little risk of disciplinary action.

In workplaces where organizational climate is infused with strong needs for control, coercion undermines norms of justice and civility, and employee abuse, humiliation, and dehumanization are permitted by the management, but control strategies are cleverly masked to secure employee compliance and cooperation. The application to workplace bullying is straightforward; capitalist bully bosses use control techniques, such as harsh repetitive discipline, humiliation, and close monitoring and supervision, to create quiet, docile, obedient, polite, and eager to please employees who serve supervisors without questioning their authority or decisions. In the short term, victims respond to coercive control by working harder and longer to preserve their self-worth and protect their livelihood. From a management perspective, the bullying may be effective and efficient, and when the human suffering takes its toll the laborer can always be replaced. In the long term, allowing workplace bullying moves from being an effective and efficient control mechanism to undermining organizational morale, and increasing turnover, lost productivity, worker complaints, and litigation.   

There is currently no federal law in place to address workplace bullying, thus a movement started in 2001 and continues today to pass the Healthy Workplace Bill, which protects the victims’ right to work in a safe and collegial office environment. The full version of the HWB holds employers accountable for fostering an abusive work environment, but some critics argue that the HWB falls short of providing adequate remedial relief to the targets of bullying. In 2010, there were discussions with members of the U. S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate about proposing a federal law to cover workplace bullying. Advocates are still pushing for the bill, but policy makers often loathe to place more regulations on businesses.

Bullying and harassment prevention should be included with diversity and inclusion strategies and mid-level managers and front-line supervisors should be held accountable for implementation of these strategies. Policies should include clear explanations of prohibited conduct and should describe complaint processes. Employees who make complaints or participate in investigations of bullying should be protected from retaliation. To the extent possible, confidentiality should be protected and investigations should be prompt, thorough, and impartial. Most importantly, violations should trigger consequences, not promotions, for bullies.