What can be the telltale signs of workplace bullying?

As an organizational leader, you may wonder how to discern whether workplace bullying, a category of workplace harassment, is affecting your workforce. You may have heard that roughly 40% (or 60 million employees) of the U.S. workforce is affected by workplace bullying*, having dire consequences for both employees and organizations. Since workplace bullying is the “persistent exposure to interpersonal aggression and mistreatment from colleagues, superiors, or subordinates,”** it may be difficult to recognize the outward signs of bullying in the workplace.

Workplace bullying generally involves a triad of individuals: the bully, the victim, and the bystander. Bullies can be managers, supervisors, peers or coworkers, or subordinates. The 2017 Workplace Bullying Institute U.S. Workforce Bullying Survey found 61% of bullies were managers or supervisors, 33% were peers or coworkers, and 6% were subordinates, with 63% of perpetrators working alone. The survey also found 70% of bullies were male, and 66% of victims were female. Victims can be high-performing employees or low-performing employees, popular or shy. They may possess some quality, talent, or characteristic(s) that the bully dislikes or covets. Bystanders are those employees who either witness the bullying or have heard about it secondhand through their social networks at work.***

The victim’s persistent exposure to bullying occurs at least once a week over an extended period of time of at least six months.** The bullying activities escalate over time, rendering the victim into an inferior position at work. Initially, the victim experiences a real or perceived power imbalance between them and the bully, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the victim to confront the bully successfully or to stop the bullying from happening. As the bullying escalates and the victim is unable to stop the bullying, the victim may experience severe health, physical, and emotional consequences (e.g., anxiety, depression, stress-related illnesses, PTSD, musculoskeletal complaints, self-medicating behaviors), eventually resulting in the deterioration of the victim’s job performance and ultimately, the victim's work termination.

The interpersonal nature of workplace bullying does not lend itself to the same outward signs of other forms of workplace harassment or violence that organizational leadership can discern readily, and thus, intervene in effectively. (NB, unabated bullying may eventually lead to a physical altercation between victim and bully.) To the occasional observer, the spreading of gossip about the victim may seem innocuous; the social isolation of the victim may appear self-imposed because the victim is assumed to be shy; the victim’s failure to meet deadlines, which they did in the past, may seem irresponsible or a sign of incompetence; the bully’s rolling of eyes during the victim’s presentation at a work meeting may seem curious or impolite, but nothing more; or the victim’s snapping at the bully may support the bully’s assertion that the victim is picking on the bully.

However, there can be telltale signs of bullying in the workplace that may send up red flags to the organizational leadership. Some signs can be an employee’s job performance deteriorating for no apparent reason; a gregarious employee becoming withdrawn; an employee calling in sick regularly; or coworkers consistently sitting away from the employee during meetings. Other signs may be an unexplained turnover of high-performing or good employees, an increase in workforce absenteeism, a spike in health insurance claims, low workplace morale, or loss of innovation capacity among employees. These signs may be symptomatic of the presence of bullying in the workplace or of another workplace problem.

If you suspect bullying (or any other workplace problem) within your organization, you can contact me at ruth@bedellconsultingllc.com, to assess the extent of the bullying in the workplace, provide evidence-based solutions to the problem, and help leadership to implement strategies designed to alleviate workplace bullying. 

Notes:

*Namie, G. (2017). 2017 WBI U.S. workplace bullying survey: June 2017. Retrieved from the Workplace Bullying Institute website: http://workplacebullying.org/multi/pdf/2017/2017-WBI-US-Survey.pdf

**Einarsen, S., Hoel, H., & Notelears, G. (2009). Measuring exposure to bullying and harassment at work: Validity, factor structure and psychometric properties of the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised. Work & Stress, 23(1), 22-44.

***Ferguson, M., & Barry, B. (2011). I know what you did: The effects of interpersonal deviance on bystanders. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(1), 80-94.