“If you have ever worked in a team setting before, then chances are you have either worked with, for, or alongside a “workplace bully.† But what exactly is the difference between a workplace bully and just a mean boss or a difficult coworker?
A workplace bully doesn’t just yell at you for making a mistake, he/she yells at you in front of the rest of your team, whether you made a mistake or not. A workplace bully doesn’t just pick on you. A workplace bully goes further than that – singling you out, mentally manipulating you, and isolating you from the rest of the group. A workplace bully doesn’t just make going to work a little worse – a workplace bully makes you dread going into the office everyday and keeps you up in anticipation of the oncoming terror.
According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, “bullying is a systematic campaign of interpersonal destruction that jeopardizes your health, your career, the job you once loved.†It likens the situation to an abusive spouse, saying that it “is akin to domestic violence at work, where the abuser is on the payroll.â€
It identifies three general forms:
(1) verbal abuse
(2) offensive conduct/behaviors (including nonverbal) which are threatening, humiliating, or intimidating
(3) work interference – sabotage – which prevents work from getting done.
And according to the Institute, 35% of the U.S. workforce, or 53.5 million Americans, report being bullied at work.
Here in the U.S., we talk about all sorts of bullying problems – but usually in the context of children. Lady Gaga has established a foundation to empower victims of bullying, the Born This Way Foundation, and has dedicated her tour bus to the cause as well. Even the President of the United States has spoken out against bullying. Both rightfully recognize bullying as being traumatic for the victim and often leading to terrible, devastating consequences. As technology has evolved, so have the bully tactics: cyberbullying continues to be a vexing problem – and one that is only getting worse. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that 85% of kids are affected by cyberbullying today – up from 6 percent in 2000. Legislators have tried to solve the problem with new laws, but because of our country’s strong founding principle of freedom of speech, that is turning out to be harder than many had expected or hoped.
But all of these efforts by leaders and lawmakers target only child bullies. What about the adult bullies living freely amongst us? These men and women torment and harass their coworkers, but because they are in a workplace, in what is supposed to be an adult situation, there is no principal to run to, no parent to be a disciplinarian. More often than not, the victim is too ashamed to bring attention to the problem, and ends up leaving their job – sometimes voluntarily but not always.
Can anything be done about this problem at the macro level? Or is it up to individual employers to spot and stop this destructive behavior? Does government have a role to play in these scenarios?…”
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