Why do employees bully in the workplace?

I had the occasion recently to speak with the executive director of a large agency who was concerned about a potential workplace bullying problem. She was trying to figure out why one particular employee was bullying a coworker. She asked me, “Why do employees bully others at work?”

Workplace bullying is the “persistent exposure to interpersonal aggression and mistreatment from colleagues, superiors, or subordinates” [1]. Workplace bullying generally involves a triad of individuals: the bully, the victim, and the bystander. According to the 2017 Workplace Bullying Institute U.S. Workforce Bullying Survey, 19 percent of America’s workers are bullied, and an additional 19 percent are bystanders who witness the bullying, for a total of 60.4 million Americans affected by workplace bullying. The survey found 61% of bullies were managers or supervisors, 33% were peers or coworkers, and 6% were subordinates, with 63% of perpetrators working alone. Seventy percent of bullies were male, and 66% of victims were female.

As an organizational leader or human resource management professional, you may wonder what causes employees to bully others in the workplace. Researchers have explored this topic for decades, and have identified multiple analytical models or frameworks. Several models look at the role of the perpetrator (that is, the bully):

·     Perpetrator Predation Model[2]. This model holds that bullying stems from “the socio-structural forces that motivate employees to treat others with (dis)respect”[2]. The model focuses on the perpetrator because this person is in control of his or her behavior and selectively targets employee(s) to abuse[2]. Motivated by conscious or unconscious bias and prejudice against the targeted employee, the perpetrator would preserve power differentials between him- or herself and the targeted employee, within an organizational culture or climate that tolerates such behavior[2]. While the targeted employee’s traits or behaviors (for nonexclusive example, gender, race, personality, attitudes, actions, high or low job performance, physical appearance, abilities or lack thereof, lack of social skills) may make one employee more susceptible to mistreatment than another(s), the cause(s) of the victimization nonetheless rests solely with the perpetrator[2].

·     Perpetrator Motives Model[3]. Here, the perpetrator’s appraisal of the victim’s characteristics/behaviors triggers motive(s) to mistreat the victim. The perpetrator may or may not want to cause the organization detriment, but the mistreatment can have that effect nevertheless[3]. Motives include (list is not exhaustive): mistreating the victim; harming the organization (indirectly, because the victim is an employee); warning the victim and/or bystanders of perpetrator’s power to harm others; displacing frustration or aggression on the victim, who is less powerful than the powerful person in the organization, who is the actual source of the perpetrator’s frustration; mistreating a member of a legally protected group (e.g., race, sex, etc.); alleviating frustration triggered by the victim’s characteristics or behavior.[3]

On a work team, for example, the low-performing members may be motivated to target the high-performing member because of envy, belief that their own performance is overshadowed by the high performer’s comparatively advanced skills, or insecurity about their own prospects for advancement[2]. In this scenario, instead of being inspired to excel, the low-performing team members bully their team member in hopes of causing deterioration in the bullied worker’s performance.

·     Perpetrator Self-Regulation Strategies Model[3]. Here, the perpetrator’s adverse appraisal leads to victimization because the perpetrator is unable or unwilling to self-regulate his or her emotions or to reappraise the victim.

Take, for example, the targeted employee with mild disfluency who is having difficulties giving his oral report to his manager because he is experiencing performance anxiety. His manager, hard pressed for time, snaps at the employee to hurry up and then belittles the resulting report because the manager feels frustrated listening to his employee’s stuttering, and he resents the employee for wasting his time yet again.

The Organizational Factors

These perpetrator predation models focus on the perpetrator’s role in mistreating employees. However, organizational factors also play a role in enabling or promoting workplace mistreatment, creating and maintaining the bully-victim-bystander triad[4]. For example, organizational leadership:

·      may create a culture that rewards competition rather than cooperation among employees;

·      may not consistently demonstrate workplace norms for mutual respect, resulting in norms that are not shared among employees because they interpret inconsistent norms inconsistently[4];

·      may create a climate intolerant of diversity, that lends itself to stereotyping, social power and dominance, and that is supported by inequitable and unjust structures and processes;

·      may have poorly conceptualized anti-harassment policy, if any, allowing perpetrators to face no adverse consequences, and discouraging victims and bystanders from reporting workplace mistreatment for fear of possible retaliation.

·      may create HR procedures and processes that lead to “competitive promotion and career advancement systems, resource shortages, lack of role clarity, issues with understaffing, excessive hours, stress, unfair and nontransparent reward structures, and other job design issues,” causing situations in which employees may mistreat each other [5]. 

Organizational leaders set tone, culture, and climate. There are steps you can take to help create a respectful workplace through consistent and coordinated leader behaviors, HR practices, and messaging [4, 6]:

·     Create organizational structures and norms that foster civil, pro-social and respectful behavior[4];

·     Adopt zero-tolerance, anti-workplace aggression/mistreatment policies. Clearly delineate accountability systems for perpetrators and reporting processes that support employee confidentiality and protect employees from retaliation.

·     Adopt diversity policies and acceptance of diversity and create just and equitable organizational structures and processes that support diversity.

·     Acknowledge and provide rewards to team and workgroup efforts and achievements.

·     Provide conflict management, team development, emotional intelligence training, diversity and cultural bias training to employees.

If you suspect workplace mistreatment problems within your organization, please contact ruth.bedell.llc@gmail.com for a consultation to help you solve your human capital management problems.

Notes:

[1]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.

[2] Cortina, L. M., Rabelo, V. C., & Holland, K. J. (2018). Beyond blaming the victim: Toward a more progressive understanding of workplace mistreatment. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 11(1), 81-100.

[3]Dalal, R. S., & Sheng, Z. (2018). Mistreatment in organizations: Toward a perpetrator-focused research agenda. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 11(1), 101-106.

[4] Köhler, T., González-Morales, M. G., Sojo, V. E., & Olsen, J. E. (2018). Who is the wolf and who is the sheep? Toward a more nuanced understanding of workplace incivility. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 11(1), 122-129.

[5] Bowling, N. A., & Beehr, T. A. (2006). Workplace harassment from the victim’s perspective: A theoretical model and meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 998-1012.

[6] Bowen, D. E., & Ostroff, C. (2004). Understanding HRM-firm performance linkages: The role of the “strength” of the HRM system. Academy of Management Review, 29(2), 203-221.