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Aggression in inherent in psychopath and to tell that a psychopath is a bully is just to tell that the water is wet. But for some of them this pattern of behavior serves as the most favorite tactics and they tend to use it more often and more systematically. Those psychopaths have a distinct a tendency toward sadism and derive perverse gratification from humiliating and/or psychologically and sometimes physically harming others. They like to hurt, frighten, tyrannize. They do it for a sense of power and control, and will often only drop subtle hints about what they are up to.
At the same time they polish their aggressive, domineering manner in such a way to disguise any intimidation as legitimate corporate behavior. Such pathological personalities always seek out positions of power, such as teacher, bureaucrat, manager, or police officer. You can also distinguish several subtypes. One not very convincing subtyping was developed by the Workplace Bullying & Trauma Institute. It includes for subtypes:
Ms Horm (cited in MacDonald, 2004) state, “Studies indicate that bullies are actually inept people who are not talented, maybe have a rage against themselves that they express outward toward people they see as being better than they are. It’s from a point of weakness that they express their violence toward others” (p.2). Thus, without the green flag there is little room for the bully boss and it is she or him that must prepare to leave the organization as opposed to the victim of the bullying.
Often bulling behavior is combined with paranoia tendencies (paranoiac self-defense). Again this category is fuzzy.
I would like to stress it again that aggression in inherent in psychopath and to tell that a psychopath is a bully is just to tell that the water is wet.
US National Center for Education Statistics suggests that bullying can be broken into two categories:The latter is characterized by forcing the victim into social isolation. This isolation is achieved through a wide variety of techniques, including refusing to socialize with the victim and criticizing the victim's communication manner or other socially-significant markers. Indirect bullying is more subtle and more likely to be verbal, such as the silent treatment, arguing others into submission, manipulation, gossip, staring, and mocking. While women can be as aggressive or even more aggressive then men (gender differences in aggression are subject to review; human society is too complex and direct project form animal world for example from great apes is of limited value) they usually are more indirect.
Here is one type from popular literature that fits the pattern:
The Fearmonger Boss. People do what a “fearsome” boss says because they’re afraid of him, which actually encourages further intimidation. He always has a threat, and he constantly follows through with that threat in order to keep his employees acquiescent.
Simplifying you can assume that most "classic types" of corporate psychopaths are simultaneously bullies. For example micromanagers (especially paranoid incompetent micromanagers -- PIMM) often are one trick ponies and just try to hammer suckers who are unfortunate enough to be their subordinates into complete submission. Like a cancer, most organizations are infested with bullying in one form or another. Side effects of bullying may include low efficiency, bureaucratic muddle, lack of accountability, incompetence, greed, dishonesty and corruption. Bullying at is rife is large corporation. For example BBC managers have been described as "managers and damagers" ! Companies can develop corporate psychosis, corporate narcissism (ref, for example, Enron or Worldcom) or their own brand of Lysenkoism.
As being a bully is typical for all types of corporate psychopath this category, in general, does not bring you to any deeper understanding of the problem you face. Bullying is just one of the intimidation tactics used by all corporate psychopath, especially narcissists (extremely easy to mix with bullies), micromanagers (more subtle strangulation type of bulling is used in additional to traditional methods of bullying) as well as paranoid bosses ( hypersensitive to critique and often taking offense where none is intended).
Like with any type of corporate psychopaths only extremely naive people can expect to reform bullies. Actually the best insight into bulling can be obtained not from reading "bulling self-help" literature, but from literature devoted to the analysis of the behavior of the leaders of high demand cults. The same is actually true for narcissists. Neither bullies nor narcissists usually act alone: they try to create their power base of patsies. And you should not underestimate the role of patsies in bulling. "Mobbing" -- a group activity at work in which one person is singled out to be eliminated is often the way bullies deal with their targets. Study after study in psychology proves that people draw a perverse strength from the group and will do in a group what they would never do alone. As Susan Dunn noted in her paper Mobbing in the Workplace Has This Happened to You,
Normal moral behavior, common decency, if you will, is discarded by the same sort of mentality that produces a gang rape. Done by peers, subordinates and/or superiors, the goal is to force someone out using gossip, ostracism, intimidation, discrimination, humiliation, and just plain meanness.
As any psychopath use violence to achieve their goals, those who are classified as bullies just use it more frequently and are more sophisticated in this type of sadism. Again it is very naive to think that they can stop that practice by appealing to their senses. As psychopaths they have none.
Female bosses are usually more cunning and inclined towards more sophisticated bulling:
They also tend to more often combine direct and indirect intimidation (like ignoring you). Again this is a kind of low-grade sadism, and most bullies both male and female are undeniably sadistic and just enjoy to inflict pain. Female just tend to be more malevolent, mean-spirited, and nasty. I think females constitute larger percentage of micromanagers, especially a special type call paranoid incompetent micromanager. Like one correspondent aptly formulate it: "I hate to say it but female bosses are worse than male bosses when it comes to attitude and bullying." They usually are more malevolent too. When organizational psychologist Mary Sherry wrote in a national newspaper that female managers were far more likely to bully staff than male ones it triggered a large reader response - almost all backing her view.
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Tim Field believes
the stereotypical view of men as aggressive and women as nurturing
often prevents the female serial bully from being seen for what
she is: |
It is important to understand that bully just want to "get" the target. The bully's criticisms and allegations, are usually based on distortion, blame and fabrication. They are fabrications for the purpose of control. Their typical tactics include:
| Number One mistake people make is to not recognise the
serial bully as a
sociopath or disordered personality Naivety is the greatest enemy - most people can't or won't believe that the person they're tackling is a serial bully, and consequently expect the bully to recognise their wrongdoing and make amends. Serial bullies cannot and will not - but they will ruthlessly exploit other people's naivety to ensure their own survival. Never underestimate the serial bully's deviousness, ruthlessness, cunning, and ability to deceive - and their vindictiveness. The serial bully is easy to spot once you know what you are looking at: Jekyll and Hyde nature, compulsive lying, manipulation (or emotions, perceptions, beliefs, etc), unpredictability, deception, denial, arrogance, narcissism, attention-seeking, etc - whilst always charming and plausible, especially when impressionable witnesses are present.
In memory
of Tim Field |
Other forms of bullying, in descending order:
According to available data women constitute the majority of targets, making up 75% of all victims of bullying. Tanenbaum also found that professional women were often hardest on their own sex [My boss, the bitch]
"Many professional women confess they prefer male rather than female supervisors. They complain that women at work refuse to share power, or withhold information, or are too concerned about receiving credit for every little thing they accomplish, or are cold toward underlings (male and female alike). In such complaints they use the word 'bitch' a lot," she says.
Tim Field believes the stereotypical view of men as aggressive and women as nurturing often prevents the female serial bully from being seen for what she is: "A sociopath in a skirt."
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Evelyn Field said female bullies were often more subtle in their behavior than their male counterparts. "Women are usually less physical, they would use techniques such as excluding others, over-supervising and controlling and verbal abuse."
Ricky Nowak, a workplace communications training specialist and head of the company, Confident Communications, says women's bullying is "often quieter, behind closed doors, over the phone, via curt emails, or through giving their staff a sense of . . . (being overwhelmed), for example: asking women with families to stay behind when they don't really have to do so."
Nowak runs leadership groups for professional women and says she has had many disclosures from women admitting they had bullied their colleagues.
"It was behavior such as intimidating others, standing over them, giving colleagues the silent treatment and so on."
Evelyn Field describes bullying as a problem for everyone. "The micro level is the individual target who can be affected emotionally, physically, socially, career-wise, financially, family-wise over a long-term basis and many of them have severe health problems," she says.
"The onlookers also get affected — 20 per cent of onlookers will leave the job, others will have sick days and suffer poor morale. And the cost to industry is enormous — bullying is everyone's problem."
In the article by Roger Dobson published by Independent (Beware the bullying female boss) the author stated:
"Workplace bullying among women is increasing, partly because they are occupying more senior positions," said Tim Field, an Oxford counsellor who runs anti-bullying workshops. "Women when they are bullies tend to be more manipulative and divisive, whereas men in the same situation are more overtly hostile.
Women also tend to leave less evidence about their bullying activities. "In around 10 per cent of the cases dealt with by the advice line, suicide had been contemplated. Eight cases involved actual suicide." Elaine Bennett, a director of the Andrea Adams charity which was set up to tackle bullying, believes that the increase is probably in areas where women have not been in positions of power before. "Where women have been at the top for a long time, as in health and education, you do get the tyrant matrons and headmistresses."
She says that in some cases women moving into management jobs are copying the male managers who held the job before them. "Women who are finding themselves in roles which hitherto have not been held by a woman - maybe they are the first one on to the board or to be a senior manager - may well take on some of the traits of male managers with much more of a macho aggressive culture," she said. National Workplace Bullying Advice Line: 01235-834548.
Bullies don't usually torment everyone. Like any corporate psychopath bully at times can threaten and manipulate any of his/her subordinates, but usually they are very selective and carefully chose the victim. They like to intimidate people who are somehow bound to the particular place stronger then other or have nowhere to go. The factors that affect target selection include: the depth of the bully complex of inferiority, ability to bully without being punished or confronted, the level of target resistance and skills in countering bulling, etc. In many cases, the serial bully appears to select targets in the order of his/her perception of danger of exposure of inadequacy.
Often bullies use deception combined with amoral behavior and blatant abuse of power that reminds the behavior of high demand cult leaders. And this analogy is actually far from being superficial. That's why it is extremely important to see bigger picture and along with bulling see all set of tricks used by a corporate psychopath. You need to study the topic and probably get some external help. If you are dealing with a psychopath remember that naivety is your greatest enemy. Attempts to "change" a psychopath are doomed and counterproductive.
One often neglected type of bulling is strangulating over controlling (aka micromanagement). Few publications consider it a typical "corporate style" bulling. Among few exceptions is a book "The Bully at Work" by Gary and Ruth Namie They defined controller in the following way (p. 70)
The bully lives, eats, and sleeps to control others. She never really experience life in any other way. Living, for her, is to control other with power. The power, real or imaged, she is both in title and her ability to generate fear and chaos in a work group.
Obsessive desire to control other is actually the modus operandi of all corporate psychopaths. Methods used can be different and have quite wide spectrum of individual variety but the essence is always the same: to control and enslave other like members of high demand cult. To protect themselves from rebellion bullies destroy group solidarity by selecting set of patches and all spend a lot of time in "kiss-up" activities. They are usually well connected and adept in schmoozing up. Among typical corporate micromanagers is a stereotyped harsh and petty female boss (over promoted secretary) or as this type sometimes called "paranoid incompetent micromanager" (PIMM).
Here are eight typical signs that you are bullied by a corporate psychopath:
See also an excellent article by Joan Lloyd Management doesn't mean mind control; use power responsibly in St. Paul Business Journal (November 8, 2002 ). In her WSJ article Overcontrolling Bosses Aren't Just Annoying; They're Also Inefficient Jared Sandberg noted :
Deeply untrusting and puffed up with some devil-in-the-details justification, control freaks wrest tasks from colleagues, along with the colleagues' sense of self worth. It's as if they were burned by someone or something long ago, and everyone they come into contact with is a walking evocation of the past demon. The irony is that in the name of efficiency and cost savings, these managers are often the most guilty of operating far below their pay scales.
Really close to bullies is an extreme type of micromanagers -- control freaks who more use strangulating control then direct attacks although they can use combination of both. Both are typical and stereotyped corporate psychopath behavior. They are just variations of the same behavior pattern.
One of the better articles on the subject is the column by Tristan Loo How To Deal With a Difficult Boss.
The serial bully appears to lack insight into his or her behavior and seems to be oblivious to the crassness and inappropriateness thereof; however, it is more likely that the bully knows what they are doing but elects to switch off the moral and ethical considerations by which normal people are bound.
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In the years since Suomi took over Harlow’s Wisconsin lab as a 28-year-old wunderkind, he has both broadened and sharpened the inquiry Harlow started. New tools now let Suomi examine not just his monkeys’ temperaments but also the physiological and genetic underpinnings of their behavior. His lab’s naturalistic environment allows him to focus not just on mother-child interactions but also on the family and social environments that shape and respond to the monkeys’ behavior. “Life in a rhesus-monkey colony is very, very complicated,” Suomi says. The monkeys must learn to navigate a social system that is highly nuanced and hierarchical. “Those who can manage this, do well,” Suomi told me. “Those who don’t, don’t.”
Rhesus monkeys typically mature at about four or five years and live to about 20 in the wild. Their development parallels our own at a fairly neat 1-to-4 ratio: a 1-year-old monkey is much like a 4-year-old human being, a 4-year-old monkey is like a 16-year-old human being, and so on. A mother typically gives birth annually, starting at around age 4. Though the monkeys copulate all year, the females’ fertility seasons are only a couple of months long. Since they tend to occur together, a troop usually produces crops of babies that have same-age peers.
For the first month, the mother keeps the baby attached to her or within arm’s reach. At about two weeks, the baby starts to explore, at first within only a few feet of its mother. These forays grow in frequency, duration, and distance over the next six to seven months, but rarely do the babies pass out of the mother’s sight line or earshot. If the young monkey gets frightened, it scampers back to the mother. Often she’ll see trouble coming and pull the infant close.
When the monkey is about eight months old—a rhesus preschooler—its mother’s mating time arrives. Anticipating another child, the mother allows the youngster to spend more and more time with its cousins, with older siblings in the maternal line, and with occasional visitors from other families or troops. The youngster’s family group, friends, and allies still provide protection when necessary.
A maturing female will stay with this group all her life. A male, however, will leave—often under pressure from the females as he gets rowdier and rougher—when he’s 4 or 5, or roughly the equivalent of a 16-to-20-year-old person. At first he’ll join an all-male gang that lives more or less separately. After a few months to a year, he’ll leave the gang and try to charm, push, or sidle his way into a new family or troop. If he succeeds, he becomes one of several adult males to serve as mate, companion, and muscle for the several females. But only about half the males make it that far. Their transition period exposes them to attacks from other young males, attacks from rival gangs, attacks from new troop members if they play their cards wrong, and predation during any time they lack a gang’s or troop’s protection. Many die in the transition.
Very early in his work, Suomi identified two types of monkeys that had trouble managing these relations. One type, which Suomi calls a “depressed” or “neurotic” monkey, accounted for about 20 percent of each generation. These monkeys are slow to leave their mothers’ sides when young. As adults they remain tentative, withdrawn, and anxious. They form fewer bonds and alliances than other monkeys do.
The other type, generally male, is what Suomi calls a “bully”: an unusually and indiscriminately aggressive monkey. These monkeys accounted for 5 to 10 percent of each generation. “Rhesus monkeys are fairly aggressive in general, even when young,” Suomi says, “and their play involves a lot of rough-and-tumble. But usually no one gets hurt—except with these guys. They do stupid things most other monkeys know not to. They repeatedly confront dominant monkeys. They get between moms and their kids. They don’t know how to calibrate their aggression, and they don’t know how to read signs they should back off. Their conflicts tend to always escalate.” These bullies also score poorly in tests of monkey self-control. For instance, in a “cocktail hour” test that Suomi sometimes uses, monkeys get unrestricted access to a neutral-tasting alcoholic drink for an hour. Most monkeys have three or four drinks and then stop. The bullies, Suomi says, “drink until they drop.”
The neurotics and the bullies meet quite different fates. The neurotics mature late but do okay. The females become jumpy mothers, but how their children turn out depends on the environment in which the mothers raise them. If it’s secure, they become more or less normal; if it’s insecure, they become jumpy too. The males, meanwhile, stay within their mothers’ family circles an unusually long time—up to eight years. They’re allowed to do so because they don’t make trouble. And their longer stay lets them acquire enough social savvy and diplomatic deference so that when they leave, they usually work their way into new troops more successfully than do males who break away younger. They don’t get to mate as prolifically as more confident, more assertive males do; they seldom rise high in their new troops; and their low status can put them at risk in conflicts. But they’re less likely to die trying to get in the door. They usually survive and pass on their genes.
The bullies fare much worse. Even as babies and youths, they seldom make friends. And by the time they’re 2 or 3, their extreme aggression leads the troop’s females to simply run them out, by group force if necessary. Then the male gangs reject them, as do other troops. Isolated, most of them die before reaching adulthood. Few mate.
Suomi saw early on that each of these monkey types tended to come from a particular type of mother. Bullies came from harsh, censorious mothers who restrained their children from socializing. Anxious monkeys came from anxious, withdrawn, distracted mothers. The heritages were pretty clear-cut. But how much of these different personality types passed through genes, and how much derived from the manner in which the monkeys were raised?
To find out, Suomi split the variables. He took nervous infants of nervous mothers—babies who in standardized newborn testing were already jumpy themselves—and gave them to especially nurturing “supermoms.” These babies turned out very close to normal. Meanwhile, Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago took secure, high-scoring infants from secure, nurturing mothers and had them raised by abusive mothers. This setting produced nervous monkeys.
The lesson seemed clear. Genes played a role—but environment played an equally important one.
When tools for the study of genes first became available, in the late 1990s, Suomi was quick to use them to more directly examine the balance between genes and environment in shaping his monkeys’ development. He almost immediately struck gold, with a project he started in 1997 with Klaus-Peter Lesch, a psychiatrist from the University of Würzburg. The year before, Lesch had published data revealing, for the first time, that the human serotonin-transporter gene had three variants (the previously mentioned short/short, short/long, and long/long alleles) and that the two shorter versions magnified risk for depression, anxiety, and other problems. Asked to genotype Suomi’s monkeys, Lesch did so. He found that they had the same three variants, though the short/short form was rare.
Suomi, Lesch, and NIH colleague J. Dee Higley set about doing a type of study now recognized as a classic “gene-by-environment” study. First they took cerebral spinal fluid from 132 juvenile rhesus monkeys and analyzed it for a serotonin metabolite, called 5-HIAA, that’s considered a reliable indicator of how much serotonin the nervous system is processing. Lesch’s studies had already shown that depressed people with the short/long serotonin-transporter allele had lower 5-HIAA levels, reflecting less-efficient serotonin processing. He and Suomi wanted to see if the finding would hold true in monkeys. If it did, it would provide more evidence for the genetic dynamic shown in Lesch’s studies. And finding such a dynamic in rhesus monkeys would confirm their value as genetic and behavioral models for studying human behavior.
Michael Lewis has a generally very good piece in Vanity Fair on the AIG Financial Products mess, describing Joe Cassano as a ignorant bully and the effects his bulling has...
USATODAY.com, USA TODAYKathy Shedd had red hair. Meg Rafferty was shy. And Jodee Blanco was just different. Those were their crimes.
The punishments for Blanco, Shedd, Rafferty, and others like them? Being kicked, punched and spit upon. They were yelled at, taunted and shunned. They spent hard time in isolation, crying themselves to sleep at night, sometimes wanting to die.
They weren't in prison. They were in school. And their tormenters were not adults, but other children. And yet, now as adults, the memories of childhood bullying still haunt their daily lives.
"I was relentlessly tormented from fifth grade until the end of high school simply for being different," says Blanco, a former public relations executive from Chicago. Blanco wrote about her experiences in Please Stop Laughing at Us. .. : One Survivor's Extraordinary Quest to Prevent School Bullying, which was published in the spring. "I was ambushed. I would find my belongings floating in the toilet. I was spat at and kicked and worst — ignored."
Blanco, a school consultant who talks to students and teachers about ways to prevent bullying — often cyberbullying — still bears the emotional pain of bullying, including raw flashbacks to childhood torment. But she's getting help and now also wants other adults who have been bullied to seek help as well.
Though cyberbullying has taken center stage among many in the psychological community, "adult survivors of peer abuse," as she calls her demographic, often suffer in silence, she says.
Rafferty, of Eden Prairie, Minn., 52, knew she was different and "that there was something wrong with me," she says. But like many adult survivors, "I tried to hide it."
Not everyone who is bullied has lifelong trauma. But there's no question that "unrelenting, daily hostilities that maybe escalate to threats or actual aggression can be on par with torture and child abuse," or that "repeated and severe bullying can cause psychological trauma," says Daniel Nelson, medical director of the Child Psychiatry Unit at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.
"There's no question that bullying in certain instances can be absolutely devastating."
The abuse that Kathy Shedd of Lafayette, Ind., endured more than two decades ago still affects her, even at age 42.
Shedd's crime? Being born with red hair — and having a name that unfortunately made rhyming taunts simple.
"Being bullied set me up as a mark," she says. "I don't fight back." It's so bad that she likes to have her husband with her when she goes out in public — although lately things have been improving for her, ever since she began focusing on the issue.
"I've always wanted to know: Why? Why do they bully?"
That's a simple question with many answers. Experts have different theories on why certain children get picked on, but most agree that being different — in even the smallest way — can lead to bullying.
As a teenager, Jenny Morsch, 28, of Hinckley, Ill., became the target of anonymous letters that called her fat and threatened her. She has her suspicions about the teens in town who might have written the letters. But even police couldn't identify the perpetrators, leaving Jenny ostracized, sentenced to sit alone at lunch with kids staring at her. The letters made her frightened, depressed and suicidal."
She did get help in college. But a decade after it happened, it still affects her.
"I feel like everything sucks and I can't do anything right. I feel like I have to be perfect."
Blanco is also still affected today, even though she spends her life counseling other victims. Recently she began therapy to help her put the pain behind her.
And she strongly believes that others who have survived years of abuse also need to find ways of healing.
"I want people who are victims, who are survivors like me, to know that if you're affected by it, you have to take it just as seriously as you would if you were abused in any other way as a child, and you need to incorporate it into whatever therapy you're doing," she says. " You have to acknowledge it."
READERS: Have you ever been bullied? How did you deal with it? Does it affect you now? Or have you ever been the bully? Why and is there anything someone could've done to make you stop? Share your experiences and opinions below, keeping in mind USA TODAY's community guidelines against personal attacks and hate speech:
There was a lot of ignorance for quite some time. But research over the last decade has now made us all aware of the serious impact of bullying not only on those who are victimised but also those who become desensitised to the cruelty involved in bullying. Acceptance of bullying (even by doing nothing about it) creates a culture in which those with ‘power ‘ (eg because they have more social power or they are in a group and the person being victimised is temproarily without social support or because they have a greater capacity for cold-blooded mistreatment of others) feel they are entitled and should be more successful. The National Safe Schools Framework has started to change things in schools. It has made them more aware of the issue of bullying and suppoerted them in developing stronger and more effective policies, procedures and programs to tackle bullying.
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Firstly consider the possibility that what is happening to your son, although unpleasant (eg rejection), may not be bullying. The defintion of bullying has 5 key characteristics. It is behaviour that causes distress,is intended to do so, is directed towards the same person each time, is repeated and is the result of a power imbalance
If you think this is what is happening ask to speak to the principal and if you feel that you havent received a reasonable response, consider contacting the regional educational authority about the situation.
Workplace bullying, such as belittling comments, persistent criticism of work and withholding resources, appears to inflict more harm on employees than sexual harassment, say researchers who presented their findings at a conference today.“As sexual harassment becomes less acceptable in society, organizations may be more attuned to helping victims, who may therefore find it easier to cope,” said lead author M. Sandy Hershcovis, PhD, of the University of Manitoba. “In contrast, non-violent forms of workplace aggression such as incivility and bullying are not illegal, leaving victims to fend for themselves.”
This finding was presented at the Seventh International Conference on Work, Stress and Health, co-sponsored by the American Psychological Association, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and the Society for Occupational Health Psychology.
Hershcovis and co-author Julian Barling, PhD, of Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, reviewed 110 studies conducted over 21 years that compared the consequences of employees’ experience of sexual harassment and workplace aggression. Specifically, the authors looked at the effect on job, co-worker and supervisor satisfaction, workers’ stress, anger and anxiety levels as well as workers’ mental and physical health. Job turnover and emotional ties to the job were also compared.
The authors distinguished among different forms of workplace aggression.
- Incivility included rudeness and discourteous verbal and non-verbal behaviors.
- Bullying included persistently criticizing employees’ work; yelling; repeatedly reminding employees of mistakes; spreading gossip or lies; ignoring or excluding workers; and insulting employees’ habits, attitudes or private life.
- Interpersonal conflict included behaviors that involved hostility, verbal aggression and angry exchanges.
Both bullying and sexual harassment can create negative work environments and unhealthy consequences for employees, but the researchers found that workplace aggression has more severe consequences. Employees who experienced bullying, incivility or interpersonal conflict were more likely to quit their jobs, have lower well-being, be less satisfied with their jobs and have less satisfying relations with their bosses than employees who were sexually harassed, the researchers found.
Furthermore, bullied employees reported more job stress, less job commitment and higher levels of anger and anxiety. No differences were found between employees experiencing either type of mistreatment on how satisfied they were with their co-workers or with their work.“Bullying is often more subtle, and may include behaviors that do not appear obvious to others,” said Hershcovis. “For instance, how does an employee report to their boss that they have been excluded from lunch? Or that they are being ignored by a coworker? The insidious nature of these behaviors makes them difficult to deal with and sanction.”
From a total of 128 samples that were used, 46 included subjects who experienced sexual harassment, 86 experienced workplace aggression and six experienced both. Sample sizes ranged from 1,491 to 53,470 people. Participants ranged from 18 to 65 years old. The work aggression samples included both men and women. The sexual harassment samples examined primarily women because, Hershcovis said, past research has shown that men interpret and respond differently to the behaviors that women perceive as sexual harassment.
Source: American Psychological Association
The Consultant
Dr. Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying and Trauma Institute in Bellingham, WA, and co-author of The Bully at Work, also says to discriminate between people who are merely difficult but who are rational and can be negotiated with and bullies, whom he calls "difficult people with horns." Bullies can't be reasoned with, he says, because they're "all about power, the abuse of power, the pursuit of power. They have superior communication skills. They will slice and dice you."
That's why, he says, the brilliant comeback line you think up right after a confrontation just won't work. Targets, he says, don't have the ability to be aggressive, so the bully who has trained and rehearsed his aggressions can always keep them off balance. And, he says, "Unless you were born that way, it's hard in middle age to become verbally aggressive."
Aggression, however, is exactly what will back a bully down. "They're cowards," Namie says. "But when you become like them, you've lost."
Instead, he offers these tips:
- Don't appease the bully or seek his or her approval. "You don't need their definition of you to survive."
- Don't backpedal, apologize or jump higher to please the bully.
- Don't expect human resources to be your ally.
- Do ask your co-workers to support you. "They can't fire everybody. It breaks the silence and makes it a normal, accountable world. But you've got to ask early. If you don't, it's like crying wolf. Use the power of the group to shame, humiliate and face down the bully."
- Do make a business case to higher-ups several levels above the bully, appealing to the company's mission, vision and values. "It's a dollars-and-cents issue on absenteeism, turnover, litigation costs, slowed productivity and intangibles like morale. Refine the message to make it unemotional, which is hard to do."
- Then, he says, take time off to heal. "You've got to be offsite and heal before you can go back and be able to make an unemotional business case."
- Be clear about your demands. "What do you need to be made whole and safe?"
The Academic
Dr. Loraleigh Keashly, associate professor of communications at Wayne State University in Detroit, says psychological warfare against a bully boss is never a good idea, mainly because the balance of power is unequal, the situation will escalate, and you'll be doubly victimized because others will see you as a troublemaker.
Further, she says, the bully may be of greater value in helping the company achieve its goals. Thus, if the company is forced to choose between a complaining target and a valuable bully, guess who will get the pink slip. However, she says, "Good companies will step in to ask why a formerly good employee now is a troublemaker."
Still, she offers this advice:If you follow the "Don't grieve, leave" pathway, she says, pursue ways to recover from the damage you sustained. And watch out for what she calls "leaking" carrying your old defenses and hurts into new situations. "Recognize that you are in a new workplace, and that's not the place to work on those issues."
- Keep a journal, "for yourself and to provide documentation if there's an investigation."
- If it's early on, confront the bully in a constructive way using basic conflict-resolution techniques. "Over time, your resources to respond become disabled and you're more vulnerable."
And if, like targets A and B, you're uncertain about how to explain leaving your last position during a job interview, Keashly says, "Keep it professional. Focus on the work you love doing and finding an environment that will enable that work, not the messy details of the position you left." She suggests an approach along the lines of, "The nature of the work I was doing and the kind of support I got didn't match."
Carl Ford's appearance at the senate Foreign Relations Committee proceedings were not without personal risk as he described John Bolton, President Bush's nominee for United Nations ambassador, as 'a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy' whose attempt to intimidate a mid-level analyst raises 'real questions about his suitability for high office.'
So why did Carl 'defender of the little people' Ford, come forward to tell the truth about John 'serial abuser' Bolton?
It can't be big P politics because Ford is Republican and conservative so it seems most likely that Ford believes at least two things: that abusing power and authority is wrong and that it is an ineffective style that will damage the objectives of the USA.
Clearly, Ford has an impressive gift for a powerful and damning phrase, but is he correct?
Why was the analyst so intimidated that he couldn't speak the truth to Bolton's face?
- Let's look first at the evidence describing Bolton's style. In 2002 he berated an analyst and sought to have him fired simply because he disagreed with Bolton's assessment that Cuba has a biological weapons program with the consequence that analysts did not feel that they could speak the truth if the truth ran contrary to the opinions of their superiors.
- It is also alleged that he tried to get a CIA Latin America analyst fired. According to USA Today, 'Rumors of Bolton's temper have swirled around Washington for years', and according to Ford, 'he's got a bigger kick and it gets bigger and stronger the further down the bureaucracy he's kicking.'
Bolton on Monday acknowledged trying to get the analyst reassigned but said it was because he had 'gone behind my back', which leaves the obvious question: why was the analyst so intimidated that he couldn't speak the truth to Bolton's face?Leaders need the truth but Bolton's approach will reduce communication to him to flattery and capitulation. It's something that Machiavelli recognised 500 years ago when he counselled the princes of the Medici family to conduct themselves in such a way that those around them,
- 'realize that the more freely they speak, the more they will please you',
- 'for there is no other way to guard against flattery than by making men understand that by telling you the truth that they will not injure you.'
Machiavelli distrusted flattery because it prevented useful information and discordant voices from being considered by those in power. He reasoned that it was better to have the information and choose to ignore it or act counter to it than to act in ignorance.
And so it is today or tomorrow. Or thirty years ago when the 'infectious optimism' of John F. Kennedy's team allied to the 'arrogance' of the CIA team working for him led to the ludicrous night time amphibious invasion of Cuba, the capture of 1,977 Cuban rebels, and the mortifying embarrassment of the US president. The plan was always doomed to failure but no-one would tell the president the truth to his face. Why not?
The Bay of Pigs fiasco was one of the presidential decisions that received analysis from Irving Janis, social psychologist at Yale, who in 1971 described his, very popular, theory of 'groupthink' as one where faulty decisions are made because of 'a desire for conformity and concurrence within the leadership group at the expense of critical and objective thinking.'
The only trouble with it as a theory was that it could only explain the past retrospectively after it was, like Charles and Camilla's apology, too late.
It would be far better to be able to know in advance which groups, teams or regimes are likely to avoid the truth and make stupendously stupid decisions. This is why a team at the University of California at Berkeley has developed something with the unappealing acronym of GDQS, or Group Dynamics Q Sort, that tests groupthink using a set of 100 questions that assess the groups decision-making dynamics (e.g. 'The group leader is insulated from criticism' versus 'The group is exposed to a wide range of views and arguments').
The team is now assessing governments to see to what extent they are 'well-informed and open to alternatives'. These include the Bush administration and its ability to shield itself from any information that contradicted its desired course of action.
If being open to alternatives really does improve decision making, as Janis and the Berkley group argue, then what are we to make of the view of a contributor to the Al Franken, Air America radio show, who said, in response to the Bolton situation,
'Wake up call: The vast majority of managers at every level in American business and government are mindless thugs, abusive kiss up kick down morons who have not the ability to lead. Welcome to the culture that is the United States of America!'
Is Bolton just a bad man with a bad haircut, poor impulse control and unruly facial hair? Or is he also symptomatic of a management quality issue?
The response of shareholders and boards of directors when confronted with the bad behavior of senior, or junior managers, is often very similar to Senator Richard Lugar, the committee chairman, who distanced himself from Bolton's approach saying, 'obviously, Secretary Bolton's demeanour is not my style', but still felt that he would vote for Bolton because, 'the paramount issue is reform of the U.N. and the confidence President Bush and Secretary of State (Condoleezza) Rice have in this nominee'.
Or, in other words, 'if the Pres wants a bully who am I to argue?' or 'if he gets results then it might be morally distasteful but business is business.'
But being too scary or too powerful stops the truth getting to the very people who need it most. (Think Star Wars - No one ever told Darth Vader that he needed an inhaler and no-one seems to tell Lucas about how his CGI obsession is ruining his legacy).
And so we find a situation where the weak – employees - become targets for abuse and stop sharing valuable truth with their managers, while the powerful - boards and senators - act weak because they are willing to ignore means in return for ends.
But if history demonstrates one thing it is that this kowtowing to bullies is both morally and pragmatically wrong, something the pitiful decisions made by the 'kiss up, kick down' guys will keep proving again, and again, and again.
This article comes from www.management-issues.com
According to the study, Bullying in the workplace - the experience of managers , the most common type was misuse of power, followed by verbal insults and undermining by overloading or criticism. Other forms of bullying, in descending order, were unfair treatment, overbearing supervision, exclusion, spreading malicious rumours, blocking promotion or training opportunities, making threats about job security, sexual harassment, or physical intimidation and violence.
The study found that bullying is most prevalent among line managers. Personality and lack of management skills were usually cited as the main reasons.
... ... ...
I don't know if this fits the definition of bullying, but there's nothing more deflating and de-motivating than a boss who shows no respect for the professional skills and expertise of his staff.
- Posted by: rag at November 8, 2006 11:29 AM
Deliberate withholding of key information.
The person works hard with the information they are given, then at the key moment the secret info is revealed either causing large reworks or used to make the person look like a fool.
Usually management playing politics.
The problem with workplace bullying is that often the perpetrators are very subtle in thier execution. So subtle, that those who are on the receiving end would find it difficult to mount a case.
- Posted by: Unwonted at November 8, 2006 12:19 PM
My workplace has been subjected to bullying for the last few years. The perpetrator is the boss, who has misused and abused his power over this time. He does so by isolating other workers, not feeding them information, taking work away from them, promoting people who support or do not question his decisions.
Over the eyars i have seen work colleagues lose self esteem and become depressed over this situation.
What makes this situation impractical and impossible to change is that the perpetrator is the boss. What makes this situation especially corrupt is that it is occurring within the public service. Over the years, the boss has learnt how to hide and disguise his decisions, so it's almost impossible to take any action.
We can research and write all the reports we want, but until workers have protection and are given the time and attention to deal with these bullying problems, this type of culture will continue to sustain and grow.
The funny ones are the guys who are real paraniod and insecure.
- Posted by: Don't Ask at November 8, 2006 12:19 PM
Selective sharing of information, vague emails to cover their butts, and incomplete handovers can be very frustrating to deal with.
But it's fun to laugh at... amazing how many so called "experts" that are so "flat-out" can find the time to cover all the bases when they are being found out.
People should try to remember that the truth will never condemn youI was bullied by two diferent managers, both female, and the bullying took the form of more emotional, passive aggression eg. barbed comments, ignoring you, poor performance reviews even when you had done a good job etc. When I went to HR it was me who was teh trouble-maker, being over-sensitive etc. The irony was, both these companies made a big deal of 'equal opportunities' and a 'safe worlplace', but when it came down to it, did nothing about bulling.
- Posted by: mxp at November 9, 2006 2:28 PM
- Posted by: lady at November 15, 2006 3:21 PM
March 26, 2007 (bulliedacademics.blogspot.com ) The green flag is clearly essential to the bully boss. As Ms Horm (cited in MacDonald, 2004) state, “Studies indicate that bullies are actually inept people who are not talented, maybe have a rage against themselves that they express outward toward people they see as being better than they are. It’s from a point of weakness that they express their violence toward others” (p.2). Thus, without the flag there is little room for the bully boss and it is she or him that must prepare to leave the organization as opposed to the victim of the bullying.
... ... ...
Perpetrators typically use five methods to reduce the indignation. (1) Cover-up: the action is hidden. Torture is almost always carried out in secrecy. (2) Devaluation of the victim: if the victim is thought to be dangerous, inferior or worthless, then what's done to them doesn't seem so bad. That's why enemies are labelled as ruthless, subhuman and terrorists. (3) Reinterpretation: a different explanation is given for the action, making it seem more acceptable, or blaming someone else. The protesters might be called dangerous and threatening. Or shooting them might be claimed to be an accident, or the action of "rogue" elements. (4) Official channels: experts, formal inquiries or courts are used to give a stamp of approval to what happened. Justice appears to be done, but actually isn't. For example, an inquiry into prison abuse might take months or years and lead to minor penalties against a few scapegoats. Meanwhile, public anger dies down and the system remains in place. (5) Intimidation and bribery: victims and witnesses are threatened or given incentives to keep quiet and not oppose what happened. Witnesses to a brutal assault might be threatened that they could be next.
Employers regularly use these same five methods in unfair dismissal.
(1) Cover-up. The person dismissed knows what happened, but others are kept in the dark. No announcement may be made. Settlements often involve a silencing clause. When the dismissal is public, often the reasons are covered up. Files may be destroyed.
(2) Devaluation. The person dismissed is slandered as a poor performer, difficult personality or slacker. Rumours may be spread alleging theft, bullying or unsavoury sexual behaviour.
(3) Reinterpretation. The dismissal is said to be due to restructuring, redeployments, financial difficulties or some other pretext. Alternatively, the dismissal may be justified as due to the victim's failures.
(4) Official channels. Dismissed workers are advised to go to tribunals, ombudsmen, courts, or any of a host of other agencies that supposedly offer justice. Seldom do these address the source of injustice in the workplace.
(5) Intimidation and bribery. Workers may be reluctant to oppose a dismissal because they will receive a poor reference or be sued for defamation. Co-workers may support management in the hope of retaining their own jobs, a form of implicit bribery.So here are some ways to prevent dismissal by good preparation.
- Collect lots of information about your own good performance. Keep copies in safe places. If you plan to act against corruption or bad practices, collect extensive information to back up your claims.
- Develop your skills in speaking and writing. Know how to talk with others. Learn how to write persuasive accounts, how to prepare a leaflet, how to run a publicity campaign and how to set up a website - or have reliable friends willing to assist.
- Avoid doing things that can be used against you. If you spend much of your time bad-mouthing others, getting others to do your work, and claiming credit for what you didn't do, you can't expect support when the crunch comes. Have others help you gain insight into being collegial, collaborative, approachable and civil.
- Be prepared to survive. You may need financial reserves. You will need psychological toughness. You need exercise and good diet to maintain your health. You need supportive relationships. When you come under attack, you may need all your reserves: financial, psychological, physical and interpersonal. If you're living on the edge, you're more vulnerable.
- Build alliances: there is great strength in collective action. If you have a decent union, join it and be active.
- Develop options. Find out about other potential jobs. Think about a career change. Consider downshifting to a less costly lifestyle. Sometimes it's better to walk away from a stressful job. If you have such options, you're actually in a stronger position to campaign against an unfair dismissal.
- Be prepared to resist. Many workers learn to be subordinate and can't bring themselves to resist even the worst abuse. When dismissed, they do just what the boss wants: leave quietly, perhaps with token compensation. If you're known as a resister, you're less likely to be targeted.
Help others. If you assist other workers who come under attack, you develop useful insights and skills - and others are more likely to help you should you need it.
(MSNBC.com)Linda Barkdoll, Coordinator of the Human Resources Development graduate program at McDaniel College, offers some tips when you’re caught up in a boss’ fury:
- Do not escalate the boss's ill humor by being argumentative, or shouting back.
- Do not be insubordinate.
- ... ... ...
- Use a calm and quiet voice when speaking to the boss. It can have a de-escalating, calming effect.
- ... ... ...
- If the situation is unbearable, or the boss is hopeless, consider finding another job. Your physical and mental health should not be sacrificed to keep the boss happy.
The Bottom Line Be strong and believe in yourself. Don't think like a victim.
Workplace mobbing - My experience
May 24 '06
The Bottom Line Be strong and believe in yourself. Don't think like a victim.
Description of mobbing:
Mobbing is a modern term for systematic bullying, harassment, or psychological terror, especially in schools and workplaces, whereby one person is "ganged up" on and stigmatized by peers and/or superiors for reasons that are not genuinely or justifiably known to most of those who are mobbing the victim.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing
How I Was Mobbed At Work
Basically, my supervisor would do almost anything to demean or minimize me in the eyes of my co-workers.
Insulting jokes, negative comments about my work, the way I staple papers, my appearance.
If she asked me a question, it would be in an accusing manner, instead of simply a request for information.
She would tell people that I have an bad temper and to be careful of what you say to me. I may "blow up".
Or tell people that I was attracted to her and wanted to date her.
Another favorite was for her to speak to someone with her hand to her mouth and point at me with the remark, "Don't worry, I'm not talking about you", then laugh.
The common thread here is all of the above always took place in front of an audience.
Human nature being what it is, the co-workers went along with the supervisor and her theme, eventually doing themselves what previously only the supervisor would do.
It got to the point that if I spoke to anyone at all, people would giggle or raise their eyebrows and smile at me or each other.
How I Tried To Stop It
In my ignorance I tried to ignore everything. I felt that if I ignored it, they would stop if I didn't respond or defend myself. All that did was make me frustrated and angry and it probably encouraged my supervisor and co-workers.
I tried talking to the supervisor. She denied everything and accused me of being paranoid. The subject of our "talk" then became the source for new material to use against me in front of my co-workers.
I finally lost my temper and did "blow up". That was a temporary fix but all I accomplished was to reinforce the negative perception of me the supervisor was creating.
How I Stopped It
I have one of those mini tape recorders and I made an audio recording of my supervisor and her "crew" harassing me and I played it for my supervisors boss. [ Note that this might illegal in some states]
It didn't cure the underlying problem which caused the mobbing. But I was no longer being mobbed.
What I Learned
These are written as statements but they express my beliefs rather than what may be factual. In other words, my opinion.
1. My co-workers went along with my supervisor out of fear and instinct. That they felt if they did not go along, they would be aligned with me and also be targeted.
2. My supervisor was/is not suited for being in charge of employees. Possibly she is a sociopath.
3. While there are laws about harassment, the laws mean nothing unless someone is willing to act on them.
4. Ignoring mobbing will never make it go away.
5. Never accept harassment as being the price for having a job.
6. Never accept responsibility for being harassed.
7. The people who harass you are not your friends. That may seem obvious but it isn't. In most cases the mob includes people you previously got together with after work, or shared rides to and from work.
Your co-workers who become part of the mob may in the future be civil to you but they should never again be considered as someone to trust.
Their fear and weakness which caused them to mob you is not a quality you want in a friend. After all, if your "friends" refused to go along with the crowd, the mobbing would be done by a much smaller mob. Just keep your distance but remain civil and civilized. You don't have to like them.
8. If you find yourself again being harassed or mobbed, immediately make it known to several layers of management. For example send an email to your supervisor and a copy to his or her direct supervisor. Print and keep a copy for your own records.
We hear so much of women as victims and the disadvantages women encounter in employment, that it sometimes comes as a surprise to realize that women are equally as capable of bullying behavior as men.
Women are supposed to be co-operative rather than competitive, more inclined towards empathy, and less towards seeking dominance. Women are often portrayed as caring more than men about personal experience and feelings.
It may be true that women are less inclined to indulge in vocalized rages - public swearing and shouting - and in physical violence, though I am sure that all of us could think of exceptions. Research indicates, however, that women are inclined towards
- The cold shoulder
- Refusing to communicate with the perceived offender
- Sulking
- Passive aggressive behavior - which respects neither the perpetrator nor the recipient.
Such behavior is evidence of women's socialization: often we do not know how to elicit positive attention, or to assert ourselves so that our views and rights are recognized and respected. So we use inappropriate and ineffectual means to attract attention any way we can. We have been conditioned very early that girls do not shout and scream. No one is surprised, however, if girls go quiet or even sulk.
The problem, however, is that unless people communicate, they will not resolve their differences.
What comes as a shock to many people is just how personally and educationally damaging social and professional isolation and exclusion from networks can be.
D Gray, Manager, Equal Opportunity, 2003
May be reproduced with acknowledgement
seek help and leave the environment, March 21, 2005
I'm currently dealing with the affects of this type of cowardly behavior, and I would like to send a message to anyone who has found themselves here at this web page:
Reviewer: a. reader - See all my reviews
If you "feel" like this is happening to you, if you "think" this may be happening to you, if you are waking up in the middle of the night, by intrusive thoughts and worries surrounding your work situation, and wondering what is wrong with yourself, then trust your instincts. Leave the environment and seek help. Please do it for the good of yourself, your health, and your loved ones.
This has been one of the most crushing, defeating experiences of my life. I hope that I can at least help keep someone from making the same mistakes in not trusting in their own perceptions.
Don't worry about revenge via lawsuits, or fighting back, or personal pride. Be concerned about your own mental and emotional well being. Surround yourself with people who give a damn about you. Seek resources such as this book in order to understand your situation, and try your best to start dusting yourself off.
These types of environments are severely ill and fronted by phonies. They are the most ignorant, the most scared and would be the first ones to crumble under the same circumstances you have found yourself. There is no honor or valour where you are at. Let them be. Rise above it, and out of it...
Study after study in psychology proves that people draw a perverse strength from the group and will do in a group what they would never do alone. Normal moral behavior, common decency, if you will, is discarded by the same sort of mentality that produces a gang rape. The new manager whose reports decide to drive him out ... the competent but beautiful new receptionist who's pulled down by jealous co-workers ... the manager who becomes threatened by the talents of a report ... Done by peers, subordinates and/or superiors, the goal is to force someone out using gossip, ostracism, intimidation, discreditation, humiliation, and just plain meanness.
The blame is projected on the victim, who, 'gas lighted,' becomes confused, has trouble perceiving correctly (that people could really do this), and accepts that he or she is incompetent, to blame, etc.
Dr. Heinz Leymann, German industrial psychologist, is credited for identifying the syndrome in Europe, Japan and Australia where he studied it for nearly 20 years. He lived in Sweden and estimated that 15% of the suicides in Sweden were the result of mobbing in the workplace. It is cruelty in the extreme, a group bullying process that can go or weeks, months, even years, until the job is done. When interviewed, mobbers often claim they didn't know they were harming anyone.
Mobbing is a particularly insidious form of emotional abuse, and the impact on the individual can be devastating. The authors cite cases of individuals unable ever to return to work after mobbing. In addition, mobbing is a serious behavioral risk-management issue for organizations. It destroys morale, erodes trust, cripples initiative, and results in dysfunction, absenteeism, resignations, guilt, anxiety, paranoia, negativity, and marginal production. Key players leave and the effects are long-lasting.
Mobbing is a "widespread, vicious, workplace tort [civil wrongs recognized by law as grounds for a lawsuit--and in this case an intentional tort]," says Scott H. Peters, Esq. of The Peters Law Firm. P.C., Iowa (quoted in the article "Did You Hear of Mobbing?" by Elliott. It is difficult to stop once it gets going, but managers can learn to recognize the patterns.
In the book the authors even cite cases where HR managers were 'ordered' by superior 'mobbers' to support a mobbing process.
In personal correspondence with Ms. Elliott, she told me that people often come up to her after her talks and say, "This will never happen again on my watch," which is heartening. Emotional intelligence (EI) and awareness in the work place are one of the antidotes to mobbing.
Systematic Abuse
Psychologists and behavior researchers have only seriously studied mobbing--group bullying--among students since the beginning of the 1980s, led in large part by Norwegian psychologist Dan Olweus of the University of Bergen. In his pioneering study of Swedish and Norwegian students, Olweus concluded that children can be very skilled in systematically using their social clout at the expense of weaker schoolmates. The goal is to enhance their own position.Mobbing thrives in hierarchical settings because they allow dominance and strength to reign as the measure of an individual's social value. It is therefore not surprising that prisons and military bases, with their emphasis on rules and rank, are often the scenes of mobbing. Schools, in which older or stronger children can lord their age and power over younger or weaker ones, share similar traits. Thrown into a diversity of personalities, certain individuals try to create a social structure that confers on them an advantage. And usually that power is wielded to abuse others.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2003 some 7 percent of U.S. students ages 12 to 18 reported that they had been bullied at school in the past six months. (And certainly far more never said a word.) The likelihood of bullying was highest in the younger grade levels: 14 percent of sixth graders, 7 percent of ninth graders and 2 percent of 12th graders reported that they had been picked on. A 2001 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Nickelodeon found that 74 percent of eight- to 11-year-olds reported the existence of bullying at their school; 86 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds also noted bullying.
Sufferers must usually face the harassment alone. Other boys and girls generally take the side of the perpetrators, fearing that they could be next in line. Or they pretend events did not happen and keep their mouths shut. Few find the courage to stand up for their fellow students. In the end, mobbing affects the entire school atmosphere, not just the bullies and their targets.
Power-Hungry Predators
To learn about what motivates the abusers, a research team (of which I was a part) at the University of Munich conducted a long-term study of 288 second and third graders from different elementary schools in southern Germany. We questioned them about their experiences: What kinds of children were apt to fall prey to bullies? How did the rest of the class react? We interviewed the same children six years later, when they were in the eighth and ninth grades. We asked if former victims were still targeted. And we asked how victims dealt with such problems now that they were teenagers.Our first important finding was that bullies can be identified early in elementary school: even at a tender age, they are able to organize a mob against certain individuals. They appear to always be on the lookout for new kids to pick on. And they find it difficult to abandon their roles over time; perpetrators tend to remain perpetrators over many months and even years.
Bullies are usually very dominant children who have learned early on that they can become the leader of a group by being aggressive. Their modus operandi is to humiliate a student who is physically or psychologically susceptible to rise to the top of the social order. They try to force others to kowtow to them by acting tough, and other children may oblige simply out of fear. Often the bullies have learned about the power of aggression at home.
Researchers at the University of Arizona who studied more than 500 middle school students found that the children most likely to engage in bullying had experienced more forceful physical discipline from their parents, had viewed more TV violence and had fewer adult role models. To a degree, they had learned by example.
... ... ....
Helping the Victim
Further understanding of what makes bullies prevail will help break down their sources of power. In the meantime, though, more should be done to minimize the long-lasting effects on those who are hurt. In 2002 my colleagues and I interviewed 884 men and women from Germany, the U.K. and Spain, more than 25 percent of whom recalled having suffered physical and psychological attacks by other children when they attended school. Their bitterness at being excluded and threatened continued to affect them in their adult lives. Former mobbing victims more frequently had trouble developing trusting relationships and lacked confidence when interacting with other adults. Their expectations of themselves and others were lower than average. The one positive note was that their previous experience was not usually repeated in their work lives, although mobbing in the workplace--the ganging up of subordinates or superiors through rumor, innuendo, intimidation, humiliation, discrediting and isolation--does happen.
The long-term consequences of mobbing make clear that early prevention is critical. The tricky task of intervening at the right moment falls to teachers and parents--who may not be prepared to act appropriately. For example, Norwegian students told a government ombudsman that adults do not even recognize their predicaments in the classroom.
Whenever someone becomes intolerably belligerent on the phone, put them on hold and let off steam with your co-workers or calm yourself by literally counting to ten. This invariably makes your co-workers laugh, which makes you laugh and realize that the person on the other end of the line has no bearing on your life and that you shouldn't be taking the situation all that seriously.When you get back on the phone with them, you are calm and cool. Instead of shooting stupidities right back at them, use logic, tell them what they need to know, thank them for their call and hang up.
One of the best policies for dealing with people who are grating a bit on one's nerves is to be honest (you'll get caught if you try to lie) but don't reveal anything about yourself. If they don't know you, then they can't hurt the real you. Inside, you are laughing, while the outside is free to look upset or offended if it will get the job done.
Kill them with Kindness
Experience throws up two constants:
- Most of the things people say while in any kind of bad mood are not meant, are unmeditated, and are the verbal equivalent of a roaring animal.
- Responding like with like only ever aggravates a situation further and reaches no positive conclusion.
Any Jerry Springer will serve as proof of this.
So, the best response is to rise above all provocation and attempt to deal with difficult behaviour in a calm and understanding way. Here's one Researcher's experience:
Having spent over a decade in retail customer service, I've found the best way to deal with problem people is to kill them with kindness. I know it sounds hard to do, but it really works the best. When someone comes into a store in a bad mood, nine times out of ten it is something other than the store itself that has made them mad. They want to drag someone down with them. Smile real big and completely ignore anything offensive they've said. Example:Angry customer - 'Do you work here?!? Can you help me?!?'You (with nauseatingly big smile) - 'Why, certainly, sir! What can I help you with today?'Nothing works better to burst their bubble. When they find their anger will get them nowhere, what else can they do? It works even better if you can get them what they want right away, because then they have to go into sheepish mode.Dealing with difficult people in a calm and tolerant manner will most likely ease their tempers down somewhat. It also helps, if you're dealing with aggravated customers, if you know what you're talking about, or at least try to sound as if you know what you're talking about. If you can sound confident in what you are saying you are more likely to get your point through than if you sound uncertain. Most people that are already angry about something will be able to pick up on the uncertainty of the other party and use this uncertainty to strengthen their own argument.Teenagers
Oh this one is really easy - how to deal with teenagers. I only really have experience of male ones, but my one lives in a completely different time warp from me, I never see him... and if I do ever see him standing up he only says 'Uuurrghh!' so what's the problem? While he's sleeping he's not eating, so that's around 16 hours per day sorted. The rest is OK too, he's got a computer, so that's another quiet pastime. I don't think he has the energy to be a problem (bless him!). Of course, things could change...Not all of us are blessed with such easy-to-please teenagers, so what do you do if you do have a youngster who is hard to handle? If you tell them you will do something, make sure you do it. The point with any difficult child is to never make threats you won't keep, never attempt to patronise them, unless you are sure you will get away with it. It will only make matters worse.Teenagers
A Researcher's experience:
I can't tell you how to handle these as an adult or a parent, but as the little brother, I tried the nice approach which failed much like the attempt of my scrotum to accommodate the same space and time as my sister's knee. Hitting back was no good either. There is no use seeking help with your parents because they are completely terrified of the teenage monster. Basically what I did was to try and keep a low profile until I got larger than her, by then she stopped recognising my existence altogether.For some strange reason, today we get along just fine. Well, maybe you can chalk it up to me still getting bigger and her staying the same size...Whenever you have to deal with an unruly person, it's best to keep a level head about your shoulders, no matter how much they annoy you. If you get angry right away, there's no chance that the dispute, whether it be with your fiancé, sister, mother etc, will be resolved quickly or without upsetting everyone involved. If you can't see the problem from the difficult person's point of view, ask them. While this may not work with some, it's usually a good idea in the case of closer relationships. The trick is, in arguments, you need to have patience with the other person, and self-restraint with yourself. Then, not only will you both get a different point of view, but also more respect for each other. BBC Links
- In case your orbito frontal cortex isn't in order, check out how to recognise angry expressions.
- Stress can make you feel miserable. Find the answer to the question How can I stop feeling so stressed
Oct. 15, 2004 ( money.cnn.com )Then there are the gatekeepers -- people who are obsessed with control -- who allocate time, money and staffing to assure their target's failure. Control freaks ultimately want to control your ability to network in the company or to let your star shine. Another type is the screaming Mimis who are emotionally out of control and explosive.
2. Don't take it lying down
If your boss has a difficult management style, you don't have to let their bad behavior go. You can respond -- just remember to stay professional.
So, if your boss insults you or puts you down, Susan Futterman, author of "When You Work for a Bully" and the founder of MyToxicBoss.com, suggests responding with something like, "In what way does calling me a moron or an idiot solve the problem? I think that there's a better way to deal with this."
If you find out that your boss is bad-mouthing you to higher-ups in the company, confront them directly and professionally. Get the evidence in writing from your source if you can. Then, ask him or her what is causing them to do this.
You could say, "I've been hearing from other people in the company that you're not happy with my work, you and I know that this isn't the case and I want to talk about how we can fix this."
If your boss has been defaming you, that's illegal. You may want to consult an attorney.
If your boss is a control freak who's breathing down your neck, you should address it. Say, "I can't function effectively if you're going to be micromanaging me and looking over my shoulder all the time. If I'm doing something fundamentally wrong, let's talk about it. But this isn't working."
If someone screams at you, don't be a doormat. If you've made a mistake, acknowledge it. But let your boss know that they're creating a difficult work environment. Even if you haven't made a mistake, you may want to calmly ask what they're upset about and if you can address it.
3. Take notes. Documenting your boss's bad behavior is key for two reasons, according to Futterman.
First, you might not even realize the extent of the problem. Futterman explains, "Taken in isolation, these events may seem trivial, but taken as a whole, it often becomes more clear what's actually going on. Some victims may be in denial or discount these events as isolated incidents. Your written records can document how severe the situation is."
And, of course, if you decide to take legal action down the line, you may need the information. It's best to document these incidents as soon as possible so they're fresh in your mind.
Documentation is also important if you plan to report the behavior to your boss's boss or to your company's human resources department. And don't dismiss the idea of taking the bull by the horns and working toward a solution.
Try arranging a face-to-face meeting with your boss. Tell them you want to discuss the problems you've encountered because you want to resolve them.
Chances are often slim that this will work, however. If they reject the opportunity to discuss things with you, add that to your documentation.
4. Know when it's too much.
Bosses may exhibit bad behavior sometimes. Hey, no one is perfect, not even bosses. But if your boss is abusing you, that's a problem.
The problem takes on greater urgency if the abuse starts to make you feel bad. If you chronically suffer high blood pressure that started only when you began working for your boss; or you feel nauseous the night before the start of the work week; or if all your paid vacation days have been used up for mental health breaks.
When the bullying has had a prolonged affect on your health or your life outside of work, it's time to get out. It's also time to leave if your confidence or your usual exemplary performance has been undermined.
Ironically, targets of abusive bosses tend to be high achievers, perfectionists and workaholics.
Often bully bosses try to mask their own insecurities by striking out.
5. Control your destiny.
Even after you leave your nightmare boss, you'll still have to explain why you left to potential new employers.
Futterman advises against dramatizing your old work situation. One way to gracefully sidestep the issue: say you and your manager had a longstanding disagreement over the most effective way of getting things done and you thought the most professional way to resolve it was to move on.
"You certainly don't want to start recalling and recounting the abuse you suffered. You'll inevitably get upset and that's not the way you want to handle a job interview," she says.
Try to control the interview situation to the extent you can. Don't give your abusive boss as a reference but rather someone else with whom you worked previously. Another good choice might be a colleague or a peer you're on good terms with or someone who can speak about you professionally.
Also, if you only worked for your bullying boss for a short time, you may want to consider leaving that job off your resume altogether
Like a cancer, most organisations are infested with bullying in one form or another. Side effects of bullying may include low efficiency, bureaucratic muddle, lack of accountability, incompetence, greed, dishonesty and corruption.
Bullying at the BBC, for example, is rife. BBC managers have been described as "managers and damagers" !
Companies can develop shared psychosis, corporate psychosis, corporate narcissism (ref, for example, Enron or Worldcom) or their own brand of Stalinism.
In their article, "A Comparison of Impulsive and Instrumental Subgroups of Batterers", Roger Tweed and Donald Dutton of the Department of Psychology of the University of British Columbia, rely on the current typology of offenders which classifies them as:
"... Overcontrolled-dependent, impulsive-borderline (also called 'dysphoric-borderline' – SV) and instrumental-antisocial. The overcontrolled-dependent differ qualitatively from the other two expressive or 'undercontrolled' groups in that their violence is, by definition, less frequent and they exhibit less florid psychopathology. (Holtzworth-Munroe & Stuart 1994, Hamberger & hastings 1985) ... Hamberger & Hastings (1985,1986) factor analyzed the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory for batterers, yielding three factors which they labeled 'schizoid/borderline' (cf. Impulsive), 'narcissistic/antisocial' (instrumental), and 'passive/dependent/compulsive' (overcontrolled)... Men, high only on the impulsive factor, were described as withdrawn, asocial, moody, hypersensitive to perceived slights, volatile and over-reactive, calm and controlled one moment and extremely angry and oppressive the next – a type of 'Jekyll and Hyde' personality. The associated DSM-III diagnosis was Borderline Personality. Men high only on the instrumental factor exhibited narcissistic entitlement and psychopathic manipulativeness. Hesitation by others to respond to their demands produced threats and aggression ..."
... ... ...
Impulsive batterers abuse only their family members. Their favorite forms of mistreatment are sexual and psychological. They are dysphoric, emotionally labile, asocial, and, usually, substance abusers. Instrumental abusers are violent both at home and outside it – but only when they want to get something done. They are goal-orientated, avoid intimacy, and treat people as objects or instruments of gratification.
Still, as Dutton pointed out in a series of acclaimed studies, the "abusive personality" is characterized by a low level of organization, abandonment anxiety (even when it is denied by the abuser), elevated levels of anger, and trauma symptoms.
It is clear that each abuser requires individual psychotherapy, tailored to his specific needs – on top of the usual group therapy and marital (or couple) therapy. At the very least, every offender should be required to undergo these tests to provide a complete picture of his personality and the roots of his unbridled aggression:
The Relationship Styles Questionnaire (RSQ)
Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III (MCMI-III)
Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS)
Multidimensional Anger Inventory (MAI)
Borderline Personality Organization Scale (BPO)
The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI)
These tests are the topic of our next article.
When organisational psychologist Mary Sherry wrote in a national newspaper last month that female managers were far more likely to bully staff than male ones it triggered a large reader response - almost all backing her view.When organisational psychologist Mary Sherry wrote in a national newspaper last month that female managers were far more likely to bully staff than male ones it triggered a large reader response - almost all backing her view.
Why are some women much worse bullies than their male counterparts?
One female respondent to Shelly's article said: "Women bosses are worse bullies than men. I also agree with Sherry that usually they employ more insidious tactics such as isolating people and nit-picking in order to undermine the other person's confidence."
Another wrote: "Your article has provoked me to put down on record that the unhappiest years of my life were caused by female bosses. I was treated so badly that I lived in a state of fear for the last few years of my employment."
And a third said: "I work for a government department and have been off work since late October due to stress and anxiety exacerbated by a two-year campaign by my female line manager. Women bosses are certainly worse than men at bullying."
Sherry said the level of response was surprising but not the content. "During the work I have been involved in for the past 12 years all cases of bullying that I have come across have involved women as the bully, though I am certainly not saying that all female managers are bullies.
"I don't want to say how many bullying cases exactly we have dealt with but it is certainly more than double figures."
She said these cases show that female bullies rarely match stereotypical images of aggressive bullies who use physical intimidation and foul language to cower their victims.
Their approach is a lot more subtle and psychological. They nitpick and undermine through constant criticism which leads to those on the receiving end losing their self-confidence and becoming risk and responsibility averse.
So who are these bully-girl bosses?
In Sherry's view they tend to be middle managers who are managing beyond their level of competence.
"For example when they are asked to perform at a certain level and don't have the managerial competence to get the best out of people they may bully. I don't think people actually decide to become bullies. It is because they don't have the competence to fulfil their management role."
And who, typically, are their victims?
According to Sherry the victim is rarely a new starter. They tend to have been employed for 18 months to 15 years. "A new female manager is brought in and undermines the person concerned by nit-picking and disempowering them."
She said that although it sounds like she is banging her own drum she does not think internal HR departments are best at dealing with serious bullying cases, especially if they involve senior staff.
"It is very difficult for internal investigators to look into bullying cases," Shelly said. "HR departments often don't have the level of delicate questioning techniques."
Nor is she a fan of befriender networks where bullying victims can seek advice and support from colleagues. "They don't work. We have seen one company use a befriender programme and we told them `you are wasting your money'. They set it up for two years and no one used it.
"You cannot expect a progress chaser or admin clerk to become a bullying adviser."
Sherry is a partner at Southport firm Asset Management Partnership which advises clients on preventing and eradicating bullying in the workplace. It runs a website, www.bulliesatwork.co.uk which features an online questionnaire where victims can answer questions about their experiences.
Actually, I have found that more women than men actually bully. Weaker men in positions of "power" (management) allow it to go on, as well.
Here's a link to another case that's going on at the moment, due mainly to women bullying, yet again (and a weak male boss!):
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2006-05-17a.50.0&s=section%3Awrans+speaker%3A13667#g50.1
I believe the person bringing the case is suing privately...
Employees exposed to difficult or unjust circumstances may not only become sullen and unproductive workers: they may get physically sick, as well.
... ... ...
Although plenty of research has linked stress to poor health, there is no comparable study on workplace justice. However, studies about bullying and psychological violence in corporate culture prove that the phenomenon exists in the U.S., says Steve M. Jex, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Such situations may be on the rise due to the stagnant economic climate.
"Organizations are getting more harsh, what with layoffs and people being escorted off the premises" after they've been let go, says Jex, noting that studies like Kivimaki's can be useful in a culture where most workers stifle complaints and put up with whatever the boss dishes out.
... women are just as likely to be bullies as men. According to British antibullying campaigner Tim Field, at least half of the 3000 bullying reports made to the British National Workplace Bullying Advice Line last year were complaints against women. There are no gender-specific figures for Australia but local experts suggest they would be similar.
Psychologist Maxine Cornwall says: "Women are more methodical with their workplace bullying - short emails, standing over someone, giving them the silent treatment. It's a lot more cloak-and-dagger style than men's."
Nevertheless, the male workplace bully is alive and well. "Men are more openly aggressive - yelling, intimidating others with their size. Everyone is likely to know if your male boss dislikes you."
What do soldiers under fire and bullied workers have in common?
Not much, you may think.
However research from a leading psychologist suggests that bullied workers go through the very same emotions and stresses as battle-scarred troopers.
Dr Noreen Tehrani has counselled victims of the troubles in Northern Ireland, soldiers returning from combat overseas and victims of workplace bullying.
"The symptoms displayed by people who have been in conflict situations and workplaces where bullying happens are strikingly similar," Dr Tehrani told BBC News Online.
"Both groups suffer nightmares, are jumpy and seem fuelled by too much adrenaline.
"In addition, they show greater susceptibility to illnesses, heart disease and alcoholism."
The favoured definition of bullying amongst psychologists is persistent devaluing demeaning or harassing of someone at work.
Disorder
To back up her years of experience, Dr Tehrani conducted a study of 165 professionals in the caring sector such as nurses and social workers.
Dr Tehrani found that 36% of the men and 42% of the women reported having experienced bullying.
Overall, one in five people exhibited the main symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
According to Dr Tehrani, the three signs of PTSD are hyper arousal, a feeling of constant anxiety and over-vigilance; avoidance of anything to do with the traumatising event; and re-experiencing, in which subjects suffer flashbacks or obsessive thoughts concerning the trauma.
Early signs of workplace bullying are sickness and absenteeism, Dr Tehrani added.
Inflict pain
Bullying can take many forms from malicious gossiping to overt physical violence.
"Generally, male bullies indulge in quite physical and loud verbal bullying," said Dr Tehrani.
"Female bullies favour a strictly psychological approach to inflicting pain on others such as gossip and persistent criticism."
Interestingly, the image of the bullying boss terrorising staff doesn't paint the whole picture.
"Bullying managers grab the headlines, but it also occurs between people on the same grade or even on occasions subordinates can intimidate their boss."
Sick
There are no hard and fast estimates as to how much workplace bullying costs the UK economy.
However, research conducted for the British Occupational Health Research Foundation (BOHRF) by the Lancaster University Management School and UMIST in 2002 suggested that bullying in the UK workplace is rife.
The research found that one in 10 people had been bullied at work within the previous six months.
Bullied employees take, on average, seven days per year more sick leave than others.
"The cost to firms must be astronomical, many millions of pounds, and that doesn't include the mental impact on workers," said Professor Cary Cooper, co-author of the study.
In addition, it appears that bullying can have a negative impact on observers.
"Our research showed that witnesses to the bullying suffered many of the same mental problems as the people being bullied," said Professor Cooper.
Public spectre
Bullying was found to be particularly prevalent in the police, prison service, teaching and healthcare professions.
The government is so worried about the problem of bullying in the public sector that is has given the Amicus trade union £1m to conduct research into its causes.
Patricia Hewitt, Trade and Industry Secretary, called workplace bullying "a terrible issue with terrible consequences".
The BOHRF study singled out the postal service as a hotbed of workplace bullying.
Stung by the findings, Allan Leighton, Royal Mail chairman, launched a programme in January 2003 to stamp out bullying amongst the firms 200,000 staff.
"Quite frankly I've been appalled by the cases of bullying I have heard about since I joined Royal Mail. These have been some of the worst cases I have heard about in my working life. There can be no excuses," Mr Leighton said at the time.
A crack squad of harassment investigators and a 24 hour bullying helpline were set up by the Royal Mail.
"We recognised that we had a problem and that a change in culture was needed," Christine Gregory, Royal Mail spokeswoman, told BBC News Online.
"Ending bullying brings huge advantages for us, it should reduce absenteeism and boost productivity
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I have been bullied by a female boss but no one else could see it because it was done behind closed doors and through persistent criticism and inducing a feeling in me that I was no good at my job, a failure. It's very hard to stamp out this sort of bullying because the victim will not be believed and is always cast in a bad light. There is a lot of this in the profession I work in - market research. Surprising? We are supposed to be objective and open minded but in this business, sexism, racism and egotism among bosses is rife. I have had 3 sexist bosses one of whom was also racist.
Anne, Kent, UK
Push back
Disarm with courtesy
Respond assertively as soon as someone bullies you. Most bullies will start to push you gently and then gradually increase pressure. Bullies most often respond best to being bullied so being assertive is the best approach. They might not like you, but they will respect you and they will stop the bullying.
Use "I feel" statements
Use a phrase such as: "When you shout at me I feel annoyed and want to be aggressive but as you are my manager that would be inappropriate. You will find that I work better when I am spoken to reasonably".
Using "I feel" statements makes it non-negotiable because that is the way you feel.
If the above suggestion is too dangerous in terms of your career, then you can just say politely: "I would be grateful if you did not shout."
Put the problem back on your boss.
For example, if you are given an epithet such as "you're stupid" or "you're hopeless" you could respond with: "That's an interesting comment. I wonder why you felt obliged to make it." This puts the problem back on your boss. Or you can use the agreement technique "You could be right. However, my track record says I am good at x,y,z". The fact that you have a track record attests to your intelligence and not your stupidity.
Deflect the negative
You could just make a comment such as "how disappointing". It means nothing but it does get the bully to think.
Importance of body language
When you are working with bullies ensure that your body language supports your comments. Make sure your shoulders are parallel with theirs and that you maintain high eye contact. If the latter is difficult, look at a spot in the middle of their forehead because if you are more than a metre away they will think you are looking directly at them.
Collective Response
If fear is running rife in your department because a tyrant is running it, then you and your colleagues should write a round robin memo to the tyrant's boss and CC the HR Department. The memo should outline the specific behaviours that you all find unacceptable. It should be unemotional, to the point and factual.
A boss, no matter how tyrannical, is only successful through his or her people and every organisation knows this. Whilst drastic, I would expect that you will only have to do this once.
Be successful.
Article with thanks to www.careerone.com.au
That's why, he says, the brilliant comeback line you think up right after a confrontation just won't work. Targets, he says, don't have the ability to be aggressive, so the bully ‚ who has trained and rehearsed his aggressions ‚ can always keep them off balance. And, he says, "Unless you were born that way, it's hard in middle age to become verbally aggressive."
Aggression, however, is exactly what will back a bully down. "They're cowards," Namie says. "But when you become like them, you've lost."
Instead, he offers these tips:If you follow the "Don't grieve, leave" pathway, she says, pursue ways to recover from the damage you sustained. And watch out for what she calls "leaking" ‚ carrying your old defenses and hurts into new situations. "Recognize that you are in a new workplace, and that's not the place to work on those issues."
- Don't appease the bully or seek his or her approval. "You don't need their definition of you to survive."
- Don't backpedal, apologize or jump higher to please the bully.
- Don't expect human resources to be your ally.
- Do ask your co-workers to support you. "They can't fire everybody. It breaks the silence and makes it a normal, accountable world. But you've got to ask early. If you don't, it's like crying wolf. Use the power of the group to shame, humiliate and face down the bully."
- Do make a business case to higher-ups several levels above the bully, appealing to the company's mission, vision and values. "It's a dollars-and-cents issue on absenteeism, turnover, litigation costs, slowed productivity and intangibles like morale. Refine the message to make it unemotional, which is hard to do."
- Then, he says, take time off to heal. "You've got to be offsite and heal before you can go back and be able to make an unemotional business case."
- Be clear about your demands. "What do you need to be made whole and safe?"
And if, like targets A and B, you're uncertain about how to explain leaving your last position during a job interview, Keashly says, "Keep it professional. Focus on the work you love doing and finding an environment that will enable that work, not the messy details of the position you left." She suggests an approach along the lines of, "The nature of the work I was doing and the kind of support I got didn't match."
The Targets
Target A says:
- "You can't keep your head in the sand about office politics. Know the dynamics of the upper-management people. I was there to do a job and didn't do the political thing. But not playing is a form of politics."
- "As soon as things start happening, don't assume they'll go away. Document everything."
And Target B says:
- "Bullies are like catalysts. They like to hit quickly and watch. If you get back in their face and let them know it's unacceptable, they'll back off."
- "It's important to make complaints to the state unemployment offices, senators and attorneys general to help build a trend."
But what are the worst examples of workplace bullying? How does it usually happen? The British-based Chartered Management Institute provides some clues. It has a study showing 11 types of bullying behavior.
-----According to the study, Bullying in the workplace - the experience of managers , the most common type was misuse of power, followed by verbal insults and undermining by overloading or criticism. Other forms of bullying, in descending order, were
- unfair treatment,
- overbearing supervision,
- exclusion,
- spreading malicious rumours,
- blocking promotion or training opportunities,
- making threats about job security,
- sexual harassment,
- or physical intimidation and violence.
The study found that bullying is most prevalent among line managers. Personality and lack of management skills were usually cited as the main reasons.
So is this study on the money? What types of bullying have you seen or experienced? Who are usually the main culprits? Is it always the same kind of people in the same sorts of jobs?
Posted byLeon Gettler
November 8, 2006 9:35 AM LATEST COMMENTS
I had a female supervisor once who definitely had "short people syndrome". Nobody did anything to hurt her, but she seemed to be determined to prove her worth as a short person and as a woman by bullying in the office; being a young shy girl, i copped it. She would do things like smoke - yes, in the office - and blow it in my face; get me to pull down lots of heavy folders one day when she'd heard me complaining of a bad back, only to put them all back up again straight afterwards because she'd "changed her mind"; threw papers deliberately across the office and told me to pick them up; yelled at me in front of clients for not doing any work or doing work improperly when actually I was doing exactly what she'd told me to do. What can i say ... i was young and it was my first job; i didn't know any better.
I worked in the OHS/bullying area for a several years (my anti-bullying website is at www.sangrea.net/bully in case anyone is interested).
- Posted by: Mig at November 11, 2006 8:39 PM
Most workplace bullying cases fall into these categories (in no particular order):
1. The sadist: this could be a sociopathic personality or a person who feels inadequate and needs to brings another down to feel better (the power freak).
2. The agenda: this could be making life unpleasant for a worker so that the boss can hire a friend or someone with similar values. Plenty of workers are bullied between their 9th and 10th year of service to save on LSL.
3. The personality clash: obviously not everyone gets along.
4. The failed romance: the nature of the sparks between the protagonists change ...
5. Jealousy: talented workers can be bullied because they threaten a co-worker or supervisor.
6. Clumsy management: where the worker knows all the rules inside out and stretches them constantly, and is too cunning to be caught out. In frustration the manager may resort to bullying to oust him or her.
7. The chronic victim: this is the "Kick me" or "Shlemiel" type of person (As per Berne's definitions) who subconsciously invites attacks.
8. Mobbing: where a relatively homogenous work group tries to push an outsider right out.
Obviously the above categories can overlap or occur simultaneously.
It's after midnight and I'm a bit tired so I could easily have missed something obvious.
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I hate to say it but female bosses are worse than male bosses when it comes to attitude and bullying. I worked at a place that had a male boss first for years, and then a female boss who replaced him. The morale definitely decreased after she took over. For some reason women need to prove themselves not only they have the balls to do the job but they can do it better - but they come off much worse being heavy handed and autocratic in dealing with people as a result.I was glad I found a new job after my experience but it left a very sour taste in my mouth over having a female boss in future.
- Posted by: Kieryn Reid at November 21, 2006 10:46 AM
Tim Field believes the stereotypical view of men as aggressive and women as nurturing often prevents the female serial bully from being seen for what she is: "A sociopath in a skirt."
It's a little-known fact that a woman can be as severe a bully in the workplace as a man, and according to experts, such behaviour among women is increasing.
Melbourne psychologist Evelyn Field says women bully just as much as men do, "but because more bullies are managers and more managers are male, more bullying is done by men. But you certainly get a lot of bullying from women and sometimes they behave more aggressively than males."
Field, author of Bullybusting, a self-help book for children faced with bullying, is also writing a book on workplace bullying. According to information she has gathered from interviews for her new book as well as her own observations (speaking to groups of women), women often feel pressured to adopt male behaviours in the workplace to get ahead.
"Women will copy the patterns and behaviours of males, so that they become really quite aggressive," Field says.
The Academic
Dr. Loraleigh Keashly, associate professor of communications at Wayne State University in Detroit, says psychological warfare against a bully boss is never a good idea, mainly because the balance of power is unequal, the situation will escalate, and you'll be doubly victimized because others will see you as a troublemaker.
Further, she says, the bully may be of greater value in helping the company achieve its goals. Thus, if the company is forced to choose between a complaining target and a valuable bully, guess who will get the pink slip. However, she says, "Good companies will step in to ask why a formerly good employee now is a troublemaker."
Still, she offers this advice:
- Keep a journal, "for yourself and to provide documentation if there's an investigation."
- If it's early on, confront the bully in a constructive way using basic conflict-resolution techniques. "Over time, your resources to respond become disabled and you're more vulnerable."
1) The Man-Manager bully
For the Man-Manager bully, men are her thing. She has a lot of experience of them (none of it good) and is very concerned to pass on her observations to anyone who cares to listen. You'll find her quite uncompromising and outspoken (she's the one who suggested you leave your husband when he was a bit depressed last year; she's also the one who kept on saying, "It's not too late to change your mind", in the lead-up to the wedding). Sometimes the Man-Manager bully can seem genuinely concerned for your happiness and sometimes it seems as if she is talking about men in the abstract (the enemy) rather than your particular circumstances. She is very big on Rules - what you have to do to catch a man, what you have to do to keep him in line, what you should and shouldn't tolerate, how much he should be spending on your birthday present, etc.
THE TEST: If you feel her advice generally leads towards conflict it is not a good sign.
THE SOLUTION: Only ever see her when you're in male company.
Well, I don't believe women in this country have ever (that's right, I said ever) been more oppressed than men. That alone is enough to get me treated like a pariah in some circles, but I'm increasingly fine with that. That's how female bullies work anyway: ostracizing, demeaning, and badmouthing someone who dares to question them. But if I have an opinion you don't agree with, and you treat me like garbage instead of asking me why I came to my conclusions? Good. That tells me that you're just a closed-minded, kneejerk reactionary, and that I shouldn't bother wasting my time with you.What's more interesting to me is to discuss these things with open-minded and decent people. Because I do believe women are fundamentally different from men in many key areas, that this is rooted in biology, and cannot be eliminated. What can be done, however, is to channel it in creative and positive directions. In order to channel it creatively and positively, however, you have to first acknowledge that it's there. Which is why I find articles like Cathy Young's so fascinating. It's nice to see self-described "feminists" questioning their own dogma and openly examining issues like this for once, rather than hiding their heads in the sand or blaming "the patriarchy."
While we're on the subject of "feminists" challenging their own dogma, I'd be remiss in not pointing out this amazing article on domestic violence in the Boston Globe that the redoubtable Kathy Kinsley (proprietor of On The Third Hand) recently pointed out to me. Which dovetails quite remarkably with all the rest of this. You really should read it. It's already caused me to put this book on my wish list.
When it comes to relations between the sexes, it makes me feel good to contemplate that my son will (probably) grow up in a far more tolerant world than the one I grew up in. Now if only I could say that with the same confidence about race issues.
Bullies within the family, especially female bullies, are masters (mistresses?) of manipulation and are fond of manipulating people through their emotions (eg guilt) and through their beliefs, attitudes and perceptions. Bullies see any form of vulnerability as an opportunity for manipulation, and are especially prone to exploiting those who are most emotionally needy. Elderly relatives, those with infirmity, illness, those with the greatest vulnerability, or those who are emotionally needy or behaviourally immature family members are likely to be favorite targets for exploitation.
The family bully encourages and manipulates family members etc to lie, act dishonorably and dishonestly, withhold information, spread misinformation, and to punish the target for alleged infractions, i.e. the family members become the bully's unwitting (and sometimes witting) instruments of harassment.
Bullies are adept at distorting peoples' perceptions with intent to engender a negative view of their target in the minds of family members, neighbours, friends and people in positions of officialdom and authority; this is achieved through undermining, the creation of doubts and suspicions, and the sharing of false concerns, etc. This poisoning of people's minds is difficult to counter, however explaining the game in a calm articulate manner helps people to see through the mask of deceit and to understand how and why they are being used as pawns.
The bully may try to establish an exclusive relationship (based on apparent trust and confidence) with one family member such that they (the bully) are seen as the sole reliable source of information; this may be achieved by portraying the target (and certain other family members) as irresponsible, unstable, undependable, uncaring, unreliable and untrustworthy, perhaps by the constant highlighting - using distortion and fabrication - of alleged failures, breaches of trust, lack of reliability, etc. The process is reinforced by inclusion of the occasional piece of juicy gossip about the target's alleged misdemeanors or untrustworthiness in respect of relationships and communication with people. Mostly this is projection. The objective is to manipulate the family member's perceptions and create a dependency so that the family member comes to rely exclusively on the bully and see the bully as the sole source of reliable information whilst distrusting everyone else. Any person who is capable of exposing and breaking the dependency is targeted with venom and will find their name blackened at every opportunity.
When close to being outwitted and exposed, the bully feigns victimhood and turns the focus on themselves - this is another example of manipulating people through their emotion of guilt, e.g. sympathy, feeling sorry, etc. Female serial bullies are especially partial to making themselves the centre of attention by claiming to be the injured party whilst portraying their target as the villain of the piece. When the target tries to explain the game, they are immediately labeled "paranoid". Attention-seeking behavior is common with emotionally immature people.
The serial bully is easy to spot once you know what you are looking at: Jekyll and Hyde nature, compulsive lying, manipulation (or emotions, perceptions, beliefs, etc), unpredictability, deception, denial, arrogance, narcissism, attention-seeking, etc - whilst always charming and plausible, especially when impressionable witnesses are present. For the full profile of the serial bully, click here. Everybody knows someone in their life with this profile - who is it in your life?
Serial bullies can be male or female - the main difference is that female bullies are more devious, more manipulative, more cunning, more sly, more psychological, more subtle, leave less evidence and will often bully with a smile. Female bullies will often manipulate a male into committing their violence for them. Male bullies tend to be less subtle, have a tendency towards physical aggression, and are generally less clever than female bullies. Click here for more information on female violence. Females often display a greater tendency towards attention seeking behaviors.
I believe half the population are bullied or harassed or abused; click here to see if this fits your experience in life. Many emailers and callers to my UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line are dealing with a violent or abusive partner or ex-partner, sometimes as well as a serial bully at work. Bully OnLine provides insight and practical information to validate the abuse people are experiencing; the sound of relief is often audible!
other women can often be a girl's worst enemies.
In "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman," pioneering feminist Phyllis Chesler dares to talk about the ways women -- including famous feminists -- stab each other in the back.
By Laura Miller
Pages 1 2 March 29, 2002 | Comedian Chris Rock does a routine in which he instructs men on how to listen to a wife or girlfriend talk about her day. Actually paying attention, he insists, isn't essential, just remember to look at her, nod your head and at regular intervals say "Uh huh," "Really?" and "I told you that bitch was crazy." That last response might seem overspecialized, but, Rock insists, no matter what a woman does for a living there's always another woman at work who she's convinced is trying to ruin her life.The thing is, she just might be right. Phyllis Chesler, author of the pioneering 1972 feminist exposé of the psychiatric profession, "Women and Madness," has produced a mammoth volume, based on 20 years of research, arguing that other women can often be a girl's worst enemies. The supporting evidence in "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" comprises primate and anthropological research, workplace studies, sociological data, original interviews, memoir, even literary criticism and fairy tale analysis -- all documenting the usually underhanded and often devastating ways that women attack each other.
To which some readers will say, "So what else is new?" Even Chesler admits that she is hardly the first to write about the subject, and she makes a point of listing such predecessors as Dorothy Allison, Margaret Atwood and even Sophocles (for his characterization of the deadly conflict between Electra and her mother, Clytemnestra). Neither is "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" the definitive book about intrafeminine warfare; despite its heft and the wide range of materials it draws on, it's just too repetitive and rambling to be the kind of galvanizing work that brings a thousand inchoate impressions into crystalline focus.
We hear so much of women as victims and the disadvantages women encounter in employment, that it sometimes comes as a surprise to realize that women are equally as capable of bullying behavior as men.
Women are supposed to be co-operative rather than competitive, more inclined towards empathy, and less towards seeking dominance. Women are often portrayed as caring more than men about personal experience and feelings.
It may be true that women are less inclined to indulge in vocalized rages - public swearing and shouting - and in physical violence, though I am sure that all of us could think of exceptions. Research indicates, however, that women are inclined towards
- The cold shoulder
- Refusing to communicate with the perceived offender
- Sulking
- Passive aggressive behavior - which respects neither the perpetrator nor the recipient.
Such behavior is evidence of women's socialization: often we do not know how to elicit positive attention, or to assert ourselves so that our views and rights are recognized and respected. So we use inappropriate and ineffectual means to attract attention any way we can. We have been conditioned very early that girls do not shout and scream. No one is surprised, however, if girls go quiet or even sulk.
The problem, however, is that unless people communicate, they will not resolve their differences.
What comes as a shock to many people is just how personally and educationally damaging social and professional isolation and exclusion from networks can be.
D Gray, Manager, Equal Opportunity, 2003
May be reproduced with acknowledgement
Only recently has society begun to deal with female bullying, perhaps more insidious because it rarely involves fists. Rather pointed barbs and cruel remarks are used, frequently leaving much more lasting damage.
Management doesn't mean mind control; use power responsibly
Joan Lloyd
November 8, 2002
They were locked in their cages. Some had been there for years. After years of abuse, most of them were subdued and easy to control. Even when the doors of the cages were unlatched, most of them preferred to stay inside, where they had become comfortable. They didn't trust that it was safe to come outside.
Sadly, I'm not describing dogs. These were people who worked for an overcontrolling, vindictive boss.
Empowerment for them meant they could bring sweet rolls and cookies to work. Independent thoughts and actions were beaten out of them long ago.
Does this seem far-fetched to you? Impossible, perhaps? Unfortunately, I have seen cases this extreme. One situation was a department and the other was an entire company.
I found it interesting that both authoritarian leaders were successful in exerting control through similar means:Joan Lloyd is a management consultant, trainer & professional speaker. Reach her at Joan Lloyd & Associates, (800) 348-1944, info@joanlloyd.com or www.JoanLloyd.com
- Hire people who are underqualified for their positions and then overpay them so it would be difficult for them to find a comparable job elsewhere. For example, if the position typically requires a college degree, promote internal candidates without degrees. They will be grateful to you and more loyal.
- Hire people who are compliant and not likely to challenge your authority. Look for traits such as an eagerness to please and nonassertive personalities.
- Keep a tight leash on your staff and limit their exposure to outside conferences, professional organizations and other forms of continuous education. You can keep them from hearing about new opportunities and new ideas that could be better than yours.
- Limit their activities within the organization, too. Make sure that only your most loyal employees are allowed to interact with other managers and executives. The more you can keep them in their cages, the more you can isolate them and control them. Make sure that you are the only one who attends committee meetings outside of the department or the company.
- Make all the important decisions yourself. Insist that every project, policy and new initiative get your personal approval every step of the way. If things pile up on your desk and your staff has to remind you and even beg you to take action, it will reinforce your importance.
- Discourage independent action by limiting the scope of your employees' jobs. Since you will be the only person with the whole picture, it will make you feel superior and it will keep people from outshining you. They will have to come to you constantly for direction.
- Insist on ironclad loyalty. Employees who challenge you and disobey you must be tormented, ridiculed and even fired. This will teach others how to behave.
- Try to catch people making mistakes. This will demonstrate how superior you are and will cause your employees' self-confidence to suffer. If you've done a good job of hiring people who have low self-esteem, this technique will result in a submissive, easy-to-control staff.
- Keep expenses extremely low, so you can stay off the radar screen of senior management. As long as your budget is tight and you aren't demanding much, they will likely leave you alone to do what you want.
- Make sure you look good to your manager and other key people. Be as sweet as pie to people who count. Run when they call and serve their needs personally, so they become your advocates. You never know when someone might complain about you and you will need strong supporters at high levels.
- Spread negative stories about anyone who challenges your authority. Try to damage the reputation of these people and discredit them slyly, so you never look like the guilty party. Quote "other people" and feign support while you are spreading these destructive stories.
John Nicholson is an attorney in the Tech-nology Group of the firm of Shaw Pittman in Washington, D.C. He focuses on technology outsourcing, application development and system implementation, and other technology issues.<John.Nicholson@ShawPittman.com>
In last issue's column, I discussed the concept of a "hostile workplace" and the need for companies to monitor the behavior of their employees. Having introduced the concept, I'd like to take this opportunity to discuss workplace harassment and explain something that frequently confuses people about freedom of speech (and other Constitutional rights). While this topic is not directly related to computers and technology, it is something that managers need to know and understand.[1]
Reader Questions
Before we get to the hostile workplace, however, a reader of the last issue's column noted that although I discussed the rights (or lack thereof) that an employee of a company has with regard to privacy of computer files stored on company computers and sent through the company network, I did not address any right to privacy or other rights that a third party (nonemployee) sender of an email message might have regarding how that message is treated.[2]
As I discussed in the April issue, Title 18 Section 2701(a) makes it a crime to access a system without authorization and to obtain, alter, or prevent authorized access to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic storage in such system,[3] except that "Subsection (a) of this section does not apply with respect to conduct authorized — (1) by the person or entity providing a wire or electronic communications service; (2) by a user of that service with respect to a communication of or intended for that user."[4] This language means that if you send an email message to a person, then any company whose network that message passes through can probably access and store that message, including, if you send the message to the person's work address, the recipient's employer. If the recipient then stores the message on a computer provided by the employer, then it would be just like the employee receiving a written letter and putting it in the company's files.
What Is Harassment?
Harassment is employment discrimination consisting of unwelcome verbal or physical conduct (such as comments, jokes, or acts) relating to the victim's constitutionally or statutorily protected classification (such as race, religion, gender, ethnic origin, or age) that has the effect of substantially interfering with a person's work performance or of creating a hostile work environment.[5]
According to the courts, speech in the workplace can be punished as workplace harassment if it:
is severe or pervasve enough to create a "hostile work environment"
is based on criteria including, but not limited to race, religion, sex, national origin,[6] age, disability (including obesity),[7] military membership or veteran status,[8] or, in some jurisdictions, dishonorable discharge from the military,[9] marital status,[10] family responsibilities,[11] sexual orientation,[12] personal appearance,[13] cross-dressing,[14] political affiliation,[15] criminal record,[16] citizenship status,[17] student status ("matriculation"),[18] receipt of public assistance, [19] or even smoking or use of tobacco outside the course of employment [20]
for the plaintiff and for a reasonable person.
Prior to the advent of email and the Internet, employers and employees did not have as much to worry about (although many of the "hostile workplace" cases come from the era before email and the Web). It was more difficult for speech or other behavior to be sufficiently "severe or pervasive" to create a hostile workplace. Employees had to actually tell each other jokes, either one at a time or in groups, or make copies of cartoons by hand. Employees could not email jokes, pictures, executables, links to Web pages, etc., around the company.
Now, however, the ease and speed with which information can be sent to multiple people (and sometimes the wrong people) creates a situation ripe for workers to be offended by their co-workers' sense of humor. Additionally, the casual and spontaneous nature of email may allow employees to write things that are disseminated beyond their intended audience and could be taken out of context. Moreover, the seeming privacy and anonymity of email and the Internet makes some people do or say things they would not do or say if they thought they might be seen or overheard by a third party. Unless employers can show that they have policies in place that prohibit such behavior and take action against those who violate such policies, employers can be held liable for substantial damages.
What Is "Freedom of Speech," and Does It Apply to Companies?
When a company places limits on what employees can say or wear or what posters they can put up, employees frequently claim that such rules are a violation of their right to free speech. Since the company is telling them what they can and cannot say, this seems to be true. At the same time, however, companies are being held liable for the behavior of their employees when the employees create a hostile workplace. This apparent conflict causes a great deal of confusion in the workplace. Frequently, neither the employees claiming the right to freedom of speech nor the person writing the corporate policy prohibiting harassment understands precisely what rights to "freedom of speech" are granted by the Constitution.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."[21]
The key language in the First Amendment is the first five words — "Congress shall make no law." The thing that many people do not realize about the Constitution is that it only controls what the government can do. Thus, on private property, generally, as long as the restrictions are applied to all employees equally, a company can impose whatever regulations on speech or expression (putting up posters, etc.) it wants without violating an employee's constitutional rights.
What Should an Employer Do?
1. Develop a written harassment policy statement. This policy statement should begin by stating that harassment is illegal and will not be tolerated. The policy statement may further include the employees' right to work in an environment free from harassment and from retaliation for reporting harassment, the fact that harassment is a violation of state and federal law, identification of specific behaviors that constitute harassment (like those noted above), and an outline of consequences for engaging in harassing behavior.
2. Communicate the policy by posting it in the workplace and including the policy in employee handbooks or policy manuals.
3. Develop procedures that will be followed upon filing a claim of harassment and identify the person(s) to whom the employee should report the harassment.
4. Finally, charge employees with the responsibility to report any harassment or other discriminatory practices.
You Hear So Many Ridiculous Stories . . .
Just like many of the stories of children being suspended from school for bringing aspirin or a squirt gun that looks too realistic, there are lots of stories about people objecting to things that seem harmless but that employers remove because of a complaint. For example, in one of the more extreme cases, a harassment complaint was filed against a graduate student who had on his desk a 5" x 7" photograph of his wife in a bikini. The employer ordered that the photo be removed.[22]
Unfortunately, because harassment law is potentially so broad (it applies to any conduct that is "severe" and "pervasive" enough to create a hostile workplace), because it operates based on aggregate effect rather than specific incident, and because the potential liability and publicity associated with a lawsuit can be so severe, companies must respond to each individual complaint. If a company were to ignore some complaints while responding to others, the company would effectively be saying that some conduct that is offensive to a particular employee is acceptable while some other conduct that is offensive to another employee is not acceptable. By doing this, the company could open itself up to liability.
The potential for workplace harassment creates a difficult environment for companies. On one hand, employers do not want to be draconian and punish workers for seemingly petty offenses. At the same time, however, any individual comment, jokes, or action could, when taken in the aggregate with all of the other comments, jokes, or actions, be the straw that breaks the camel's back for an individual employee. To avoid the risk of creating a "hostile workplace," an employer cannot simply tell all of its employees not to do or say so many offensive things that the sum of all of the offenses would create a hostile workplace. There is no way for any employee to know what other employees are doing or saying at all times. One employee may be present in different groups on different occasions when a single employee or even different employees make similar comments or tell similar jokes that are offensive to that one person. These separate events could be interpreted by a judge or a jury to be sufficiently "severe" and "pervasive" to create a hostile work environment. Because there is no way for any individual employee to know whether other employees are making similar jokes or comments or are doing or saying enough other things that the result of the collective actions is to create a hostile workplace, an employer has to prohibit all potentially offensive behavior and respond to each complaint equally.
Conclusion
Harassment is any speech or other behavior that, if "severe" and "pervasive" enough, can create a hostile workplace. The First Amendment protections for freedom of speech generally do not apply in the workplace; they apply only to government action. Because the terms "severe" and "pervasive" are so vague, to protect themselves from liability, employers must establish and enforce policies that restrict any speech or activity that, if repeated enough times or by enough people, might be held by a jury or judge to be "severe" or "pervasive" enough to create a hostile workplace.
NOTES
[1] This article provides general information and represents the author's views. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be used or taken as legal advice relating to any specific situation.
[2] For a discussion of an employee's right to electronic privacy in the workplace, see "Electronic Privacy in the Workplace," in the April 2000 issue of ;login:.
[3] Section 2701(a) states: "Offense. Except as provided in subsection (c) of this section whoever (1) intentionally accesses without authorization a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided; or (2) intentionally exceeds an authorization to access that facility; and thereby obtains, alters, or prevents authorized access to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic storage in such system shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) of this section."
[4] 18 U.S.C. 2701(c).
[5] Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law (1996) <http://dictionary.findlaw.com/scripts/ results.pl?co=www&topic=7c/7cea1d560bd690325e45218463669979>
[6] See, e.g., Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc., 510 U.S. 17, 21-22 (1993) (barring harassment based on race, religion, sex, or national origin).
[7] Eggleston v. South Bend Community Sch. Corp., 858 F. Supp. 841, 847—48 (N.D. Ind. 1994) (barring harassment based on age and disability under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act).
[8] 38 U.S.C. §4311 (1994) (barring discrimination against present or former armed service members). Additionally, several states, including California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, have passed statutes that prohibit discrimination against present members of the armed services and/or the National Guard.
[9] Ill. Stat. Ch. 775 §§5/1-103(Q), 5/2-102 (1997) (barring discrimination in "terms, privileges or conditions of employment" based on "unfavorable discharge from military service").
[10] See, e.g., Cal. Gov't Code §12940(h)(1) (West 1992 & Supp. 1995) (barring discrimination based on marital status).
[11] D.C. Code Ann. §1-2512 (1981 & Supp. 1988) (barring discrimination in "terms, conditions, . . . or privileges of employment" based on "family responsibilities").
[12] Leibert v. Transworld Sys., Inc., 39 Cal. Rptr. 2d 65, 67 (Ct. App. 1995) (barring harassment based on sexual orientation).
[13] D.C. Code Ann. §1-2512 (1981 & Supp. 1988) (barring discrimination in "terms, conditions, . . . or privileges of employment" based on "personal appearance").
[14] New Orleans Code §86-1 (stating that discrimination based on "gender identification," which includes cross-dressing, is to be treated as discrimination based on sexual orientation), 86-131 (barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, defined to include discrimination "with respect to . . . terms, conditions or privileges of employment," which includes hostile environment harassment).
[15] D.C. Code Ann. §1-2512 (1981 & Supp. 1988) (barring discrimination in "terms, conditions, . . . or privileges of employment" based on "political affiliation").
[16] N.Y. Correction Law §752 (generally banning discrimination based on having "previously been convicted of one or more criminal offenses").
[17] Ill. Stat. Ch. 775 §5/2-102 (1997) (barring discrimination in "terms, conditions or privileges of employment" based on "citizenship status").
[18] D.C. Code Ann. §1-2512 (1981 & Supp. 1988) (barring discrimination in "terms, conditions, . . . or privileges of employment" based on "matriculation").
[19] Minn. Stat. Ann. §363.03(2) (barring discrimination in "terms, conditions, . . . or privileges of employment" based on "status with regard to public assistance").
[20] D.C. Code Ann. §1-2512 (1981 & Supp. 1988) (barring discrimination in "terms, conditions, . . . or privileges of employment" based on "smoking or using tobacco or tobacco products outside the course of . . . employment").
[21] U.S. CONST. amend. I.
[22] Nat Hentoff, "A 'Pinup' of His Wife," Washington Post, June 5, 1993, at A21. The law's ban on sexually suggestive materials in the workplace is not limited to those containing nudity; see, e.g., In re Butler, 166 Vt. 423, 697 A.2d 659, 664 (1997) (concluding that "a poster of a woman in a skimpy bikini" could count as harassment, because "the posting or display of any sexually oriented materials in common areas that tend to denigrate or depict women as sexual objects may serve as evidence of a hostile environment")
Most people at some point in their lives have to deal with a difficult boss. Difficult supervisors vary in personality from being a little pushy or rude, all the way to being downright abusive. Many people feel that an abusive boss has control of their personal life outside of work by lowering their self-esteem and making them live in constant fear. The role of a supervisor sometimes attracts certain controlling-type personalities because they crave the power it gives them and because they lack such control in their own personal lives. A supervisor has complete control over your most basic human needs—your ability to put food on the table and a roof over your head. These are powerful motivating factors that allow a difficult supervisor to control people out of fear of losing these basic needs. We may not be able to always correct their behavior, but we should never have to live in fear and let our difficult boss control our lives.
Here are some strategies on handling a difficult boss situation.
- Always have a plan B. Most people are scared about having a discussion with their boss concerning their abusive behavior because they fear reprimand or losing their job as a result of it. Their fear is usually justified if the supervisor is a control-freak and feels that their subordinate is threatening their control. Before you deal with any type of conflict, you always need to have a plan B in case things don’t work out. A plan B is the best alternative that you can come up without having to negotiate anything with your boss. In this type of scenario, your best plan B would probably take the form of having an actual job offer in hand with another employer before you have your talk. By not having a back-up plan, you have given your abusive boss even more leverage over you because they know you have no where else to go. Having a plan B, however, empowers you with the ability to walk-away at any time should the negotiation not go right. Increase your power and have a plan B before you deal with the conflict.
- Never react to verbal abuse or harsh criticism with emotion. This will always get you into more trouble than you started with because it will become a war between egos and chances are good that your boss has a bigger ego than you have—hence why he is difficult in the first place. When a personal attack is made on you, they are trying to bait you into reacting emotionally because once you react, you become an easy target for additional attacks. The key then is not to react, but to acknowledge and move on. By doing this, you effectively strip all of the power behind their verbal attacks away from your abusive boss, without creating conflict. If your boss happens to be an intimidator or a control freak, then the best way of dealing with their behavior is to remain calm and acknowledge their power by saying, "I'm sorry." By saying this, you take away any chance of them lashing back at you because you have sidestepped [deflected - NNB]their verbal attack rather than meeting it head on.
- Discuss rather than confront. When your boss criticizes you, don’t react out of emotion and become confrontational with them about it because that just breeds more conflict. Instead, use their criticism as a topic for discussion on interests, goals, and problem-solving and ask them for their advice. If they criticize your work, then that means that they have their own idea on how that work should be done, so ask them for their advice on how your work can be improved.
- Manage the manager. A source of conflict usually occurs when a group of employees gets a new manager who demands that things run differently. These changes are usually reactionary in nature because the employees go about their regular duties until the manager comes by and criticizes the way it is being done. Instead of waiting for their criticism, take a proactive approach and be absolutely clear from the very beginning on how your boss wants things to be done so that there is no miscommunication later on. There are many ways of completing a task and having a discussion about them at the very beginning will allow you to see things from their perspective as well as sharing your own with them. Get to know their likes and dislikes inside and out so that you can avoid future criticisms.
- Know that you can do little to change them. Being a difficult person is part of their personality and therefore it is a very difficult, if not impossible thing to change in a supervisor, so don’t think that you can change how they act. Instead, change the way that you view their behavior. Don’t label them as being a jerk--just merely label them as your boss. By avoiding derogatory labeling, you avoid making it easy on yourself to be angry with your boss.
Stop Creating Conflict
It's better to prevent unnecessary conflict than to manage conflict once the flames have started. Click here to preview Conflict Prevention In The Workplace - Using Cooperative Communication- Keep your professional face on. Know the difference between not liking your boss and not being professional. You don’t have to make your boss your friend or even like your boss as a person, but you do have to remain professional and get the job done and carry out their instructions dutifully as a subordinate, just as you would expect them to be professional as do their duties as a supervisor.
- Evaluate your own performance. Before you go attacking your boss, examine your own performance and ask yourself if you are doing everything right. Get opinions from other coworkers about your performance and see if there is any warrant to the criticisms of your supervisor before you criticize their opinions.
- Gather additional support. If others share in your concern, then you have the power of numbers behind you to give you additional persuasion power over your boss. It is often easy for a supervisor to ignore or attack one employee, but it becomes more difficult to attack all of his employees. He might be able to fire one of you, but he will look like an idiot (and probably get fired himself) if he tries to fire all of you. An interdepartment union is a good way of mustering power against an abusive employer.
- Don’t go to up the chain of command unless it’s a last resort. Going straight up the chain of command is not an effective way of dealing with a difficult supervisor because it only increases conflict in the workplace. Your immediate supervisor will consider this a very serious backstabbing maneuver and might seek some sort of retribution in the future against you and your career. Also, other people in your workplace might brand you as a whistleblower because of your actions. Try to discuss issues with your supervisor first and only go up the chain of command as a last resort.
Stop Letting Conflict Control YOU
Learn to manage conflict by "using your head", rather than your heart. Find out about pro's and con's of different conflict methods.Click here to preview Using Your Head to Manage Conflict Helpcard.
- Encourage good behavior with praise. It is easy to criticize your superiors, but criticisms often lead towards resentment and hostile feelings. Everyone likes a pat on the back for good behavior, so you should strive to watch for good behaviors from your supervisor and compliment them on that. Proactive praising is much more effective than reactive criticisms.
- Document everything. If you choose to stay with a toxic employer, then document everything. This will become your main ammunition should a complaint ever be filed down the road. Document interactions with them as well as your own activities so that you can remind them of your own achievements at performance review time.
- Leave work at work. Get into the habit of leaving work at home and not bringing it into your personal life because that will only add to your level of stress. Keep your professional life separate from your personal life as best as you can. This also includes having friends who you don’t work with so that you can detach yourself from your work life rather than bringing it home with you.
As many as 30 percent of employees experience workplace bullying, research shows. A bully boss aims to control subordinates by using demeaning methods.
Screaming and throwing things, as Bolton is accused of doing, are actually rare. More common are covert techniques such as constant fault-finding, changing work schedules and withholding needed resources, said Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying and Trauma Institute in Bellingham, Wash.
"They get you behind closed doors and start to chip away at your self-confidence," Namie said. "They use personal data about people for reconnaissance, just to shame and humiliate the person."
That's what happened to Stacey, a Pennsylvania nurse. A month after she started at a nursing home, she was called into the nurse manager's office and "my whole performance was attacked," she said.
For the next four years, the manager periodically chewed her out for practices that were common among the staff, changed her schedule from full-time to part-time, and told her there were negative rumors about her, she said. She was criticized for having attention deficit disorder, for getting pregnant and even for having a Jewish husband.
"My formal performance evaluations were always good," Stacey said. "It was these off-the-record things designed to break my spirit."
Often, the only symptoms of a bully boss are a steady trickle of staff resignations, low productivity and the glum faces around the water cooler.
Companies should remember the workplace truth that people don't quit jobs, they quit managers, human resource experts said.
Almost two-thirds of people who leave a position cite bad leadership, with compensation and benefits "way down at the bottom" of reasons, Wellins said.
Bullying causes stress, which costs corporations $300 billion each year and is responsible for 1 million absences each day, said Kathleen Hall, a stress-management expert based in Clarkesville, Ga., and author of "Alter Your Life."
"Employers have to understand it is going to kill and take the lifeblood out of their company," Hall said.
Do you work for a boss who doesn't appreciate you? Do you feel ignored or excessively criticized? If you do, life can be a misery, if you make it so. Or you can work around it. It's up to you to choose.rad appeared at Lauren's door. "Got a few minutes?" He didn't wait for her answer. He just closed the door behind himself and sat. Lauren wasn't surprised, because Brad hadn't been himself for days. She closed her laptop and rotated her chair to face him.
"You seem a little down...you OK?" she asked.
"Not really," he said. "I've had it with Warren." Warren was his boss. "No matter what you do, he isn't satisfied. When you tell him good news, if there's nothing obvious to criticize, he changes the subject. I'm done."
Lauren was sympathetic. "I know. He's a horror. What's happening with your transfer?"
Brad works for an unappreciative boss, and Lauren is reminding Brad of one of the truly useful tactics for this situation — moving on. Sometimes you can get out either by transferring, finding a new job, or waiting for your boss to move on.
But even if you can't move on, you can still change your own experience of the unappreciative boss. Here are five tactics you can use today.
- Even when you can't
move on, you can
still change how you
experience your
boss's behavior- Recognize that the situation is unacceptable
- Failing to appreciate excellent performance, or failing to recognize it publicly, is bad management. It's abusive and you deserve better.
- Stop using it to make yourself feel bad
- You are 100% in charge of your own feelings. Although you can't really know why your boss behaves this way, you can decide that you won't use the behavior to make yourself feel bad or angry.
- Seek support
- Everything is easier with support. Perhaps you have peers who feel the same way, and you can form a validation circle. Or you can ask for understanding from a friend or spouse.
- Avoid the Fundamental Attribution Error
- Humans tend to attribute others' motivation too much to character and inclination, and too little to context. For instance, your boss might be distracted by troubles outside of your awareness, and might lack the energy or attention to recognize your work. There might be dozens of scenarios like that. See "The Fundamental Attribution Error," Point Lookout for May 5, 2004.
- Understand that some things aren't about you
- Your boss might not be trying to send you a message of unappreciation — something else might explain what's going on. Some bosses feel that by keeping the pressure up, they'll produce better performance. Some feel threatened by superior performance by subordinates. Some have designated a "star" subordinate, at least in their own minds, and have decided not to praise anyone else. Others have difficulty expressing appreciation, for reasons of personal history.
Most important, recognize that basing your self-esteem on what another person says to you is a risky strategy — it surrenders control and power to that person. To keep your own power, and to maintain your autonomy, listen to your inner voice. You are in charge of you.
Cutouts are people or procedures that enable political operators to communicate in safety. Using cutouts, operators can manipulate their environments while limiting their personal risk. How can you detect cutouts? And what can you do about them?In espionage, a cutout acts as a secure means of communication. Its security usually derives from an asymmetry in its connection to the larger system. That is, while the people who communicate through the cutout know how to send messages to the cutout and how to receive messages from the cutout, the cutout probably doesn't know how to contact the communicators. A "dead drop" can be an example of a cutout. Another example: a courier who doesn't know the source of the freight carried.
Cutouts also play roles in organizational politics. Here are three examples of cutouts or their use in the workplace.
Scott McLellan, White House Press Secretary, 2003-2006.
Source: US White House.
By simply making information available in a deniable way, an operator might encourage an ambitious subordinate to pursue a project. The disclosure might be something as simple as an apparently careless exposure of a memo on a desk or screen. The subordinate receives the information, but cannot reveal its source, without seeming to be a snoop.
Ambiguous direction Ambiguous direction creates a chance that subordinates will do what the operator wants when the operator cannot ethically direct the subordinate to do so. If ever a problem arises, the operator can assert that he or she had something else in mind, and that the subordinate initiated the ethical breach. When combined with subjective cues, such as facial expressions and knowing glances, especially when delivered in private, ambiguous directions are especially effective.
Cutouts enable devious operators to limit the risks of organizational politics Typically, human cutouts deliver or leak information on behalf of their operators, but they're unwilling or unable to credibly reveal sources or other related information. This protects the operator when the information leads to undesirable consequences or to pressure to reveal more. If the ploy backfires, then the operator can assert that either the human cutout misspoke, or exceeded authority, or any of a variety of other insulating claims.
When you spot a ploy that could be a cutout, what can you do?
- Decide if it's acceptable
- You might be content to receive the information through the cutout. This is a risky approach, but always a possibility.
- Seek clarification
- Ask for a direct disclosure instead, especially if you're receiving ambiguous direction. For instance, "You certainly wouldn't want us to act unethically...do you mean X or Y?"
- Smoke out the operator
- If you receive information that you "shouldn't" have, ask about it directly. "I've heard that Marigold might be revived. Know anything about that?" The operator now has a stark choice: to deny, to lie, to decline, or to reveal. If the information is revealed in front of witnesses, you're safe. If the operator continues to withhold, or dissembles, you might have found an accidental slip. Otherwise, take care.
Cutouts give you information that can be too hot to handle. Sometimes it's best to just ignore it — to appear to have missed the message. But don't miss this message.
The Lawyer
Sam Samaro, a partner at the Hackensack, NJ, law firm Pashman Stein who specializes in employment law, says, "Bullying that isn't caused by the victim's membership in some protected class is not illegal." In other words, if the bully attacks men and women; Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists; blacks, whites and Asians; disabled and non-disabled people equally, he says, "It's hard to make a legal case."
Rather, he says, when a target asks for his help, he takes a crisis-counseling approach. He first tries to determine whether the issue is persistent bullying or just situational, and what triggers it. "We all have the capacity to be a bully in the right or wrong circumstances. Is this just a performance issue?" he asks. Unfortunately, he adds, "There's no general protection from unpleasant people."
More than half of the bullies reported to a new national helpline are women - and most of the victims are other women.
In the first half of this year, nearly 700 complaints were made about women managers, according to a report from the National Workplace Bullying Advice Line.
The data from the line also reveal that white-collar bullying among professional and office workers is far more common than among shopfloor workers. Nine out of 10 calls involved office-based workers. The public sector accounts for more than half the calls, with one in five complainants working in the caring agencies, the NHS or social services. "Workplace bullying among women is increasing, partly because they are occupying more senior positions," said Tim Field, an Oxford counsellor who runs anti-bullying workshops. "Women when they are bullies tend to be more manipulative and divisive, whereas men in the same situation are more overtly hostile. Women also tend to leave less evidence about their bullying activities. "In around 10 per cent of the cases dealt with by the advice line, suicide had been contemplated. Eight cases involved actual suicide."
The woman at my last job, who was the reason I left, was the worst one of the lot. She was a classic workplace bully. She would whisper to your colleagues in front of you, causing you to wonder what they could possibly be talking about that couldn't be said out loud (or in a quiet conference room somewhere). She would set impossible tasks and give you very little direction and no time to do it in, then question your commitment to your job in front of the Manager. Her power-move was the one where, if you finally got up the nerve to tell her that she was asking too much of you, was to BURST INTO TEARS in front of the Manager, making him believe that you had said something unkind to her, and thus causing him to ask you to leave one week into your four weeks' notice. That woman still works there, the people above her still think she's great, her clients think she's terrific, but there are now twelve former employees of that company who have left on account of her behaviour. She gave the illusion of being a nice person, but scratch the very thin surface and you see that it's just that - an illusion. A dozen people, men and women, can't be wrong. But I'd be willing to bet her friends all think she's wonderful.
the worst manager I had was a self-obsessed childless bitch. I really hope she never procreates. The MD at the time, though, thought that her bullying and rudeness demonstrated toughness and has promoted her endlessly. She is incredibly paranoid and everynow and then lets her guard down and confesses she is a 'fraud' and that her whole bravado is an act. Beneath her she only promoted people who behaved in the same depraved manner..and having a child would have been seen as some kind of weakness.
Anyway, having a child for me has made me a much more relaxed person as you just don't have time to worry about stupid little things! I find that people in the workforce with children have a much better and balanced perspective on life and don't go to bed grinding their teeth endlessly (like aforementioned psycho bitch).
People who claim they're being bullied are just trying to hide the fact they're not very good at their job, aren't they?
In at least 95% of the cases of bullying reported to the UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line, the person has been picked on because they are good at their job and popular with people. Bullies are driven by jealousy (of relationships) and envy (of abilities). The target just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If you have an employee who is genuinely underperforming, then:
a) there will be substantive and quantifiable evidence that they are underperforming
b) there is already a problem with that person's manager for i) causing and allowing that situation to develop, ii) not taking positive action before,
c) bullying will always make a problem worse so any manager who thinks that bullying improves performance is revealing their inadequacy as a managerHow do I tell the difference between someone who is really being bullied and someone who's claiming bullying to hide their poor performance?
The person who is being bullied will have, or quickly be able to construct, a fat folder of evidence, often covering several months, maybe years. They will report a stream of bullying behaviours, especially nit-picking, fault-finding and constant criticism and allegations, all of which lack substantive and quantifiable evidence, for they are just the bully's opinion. It's the patterns, the regularity and the number of incidents which reveal bullying.
The person who is making a spurious claim might produce half a dozen sheets of paper, if that.But you've got to bully people to get the job done, haven't you?
Bullies are weak, inadequate people who lack people skills, lack empathy, lack interpersonal skills, lack leadership skills, lack motivational skills, lack judgement, lack foresight and hindsight, lack forward thinking skills, etc. Bullies bully to hide the fact they lack these skills. Serial bullies are compulsive liars with a Jekyll and Hyde nature who use charm and mimicry to deceive peers and superiors. Bullying results in demotivation, demoralisation, disenchantment, disaffection, disloyalty, ill-health, high sickness absence, high staff turnover, an us-and-them culture, low productivity, frequent mistakes, low morale, non-existent team spirit, poor customer service, no continuity of customer care, etc. And that's just for starters.Isn't there a fine line between admonishing people who are not performing and using strong management to get the job done?
a) Bullying is a cause of underperformance, not the solution
b) There are recognised ways of dealing with underperformance; bullying is not one of them
c) Bullying makes underperformance worse, not better
d) Bullying prevents employees from fulfilling their duties
e) "Underperforming" employees seem to follow the bully wherever s/he goes
f) It is always the bully who is weak, inadequate, and underperforming
g) Bullies are weak managers; bullying is designed to hide that weakness by giving the appearance of strength whilst diverting attention away from the bullySurely a manager has a right to deal with the underperformance of a subordinate?
False allegations of underperformance are designed to divert attention away from the bully's own inadequacy and to create conflict between those who might share incriminating information about him/her.Isn't it always just a case of the employee and employer fighting each other?
Almost always the employee and employer end up in an adversarial contest in which both are losers regardless of the outcome. However, the employee and employer should be on the same side fighting the bully. Bullies are adept at creating conflict between those who would otherwise pool incriminating information about them. Bullies also gain gratification (a perverse indulgence in that nice warm feeling we call satisfaction) from encouraging and then watching others engage in destructive conflict. Bullies are also adept at manipulation (especially of people's emotions), deception, and evasion of accountability.My Human Resources department refuse to take me seriously. Instead, they are doing everything they can to support the bully whilst getting rid of me. Why is this?
From dealing with thousands of cases in which this happens - albeit a self-selecting audience which may not scale up nationally - I've identified the following reasons:
1) Human Resources (HR) people are not trained in dealing with bullying - it's not in their textbooks, not in their training, and their professional body in the UK (CIPD) has not given the issue the attention it needs.
2) The HR profession seems to attract a number of people who are not people-focused and thus not good at dealing with people problems.
3) HR is not there for employees. The role of HR is to keep the employer out of court.
4) The majority of HR people are female, and females seem particularly susceptible to charm, which is one of the bully's main weapons of deception.
5) By the time HR get to hear of the bullying they are faced with an articulate, plausible, convincing, charming "bully" and a gibbering wreck of a "target" who is traumatised and thus unconvincing, inarticulate, incoherent, obsessed, apparently paranoid, tearful, distressed and highly emotional. By this time the bully has already convinced HR that the target has a "mental health problem", is a liability to the organisation, and needs to be got rid of.
6) When it's one word against another with no witnesses, HR take the word of the senior employee (almost always the bully).
7) There's no law against bullying so there's no case to answer.
8) The employer doesn't have an anti-bullying policy so it's not a disciplinary issue.
9) The employer does have an anti-bullying policy but it's just words on paper
10) The bully is a tough dynamic manager who gets the job done and the high turnover of staff in the bully's department is because they're all wimps who can't meet the demanding standards of performance demanded by this exemplary manager. Yawn.
11) If HR recognise they have a bully, they're not going to admit it because to do so is tantamount to admitting liability for this - and previous - cases.
12) HR are not going to admit that they've made a mistake recruiting an incompetent individual who bullies to hide his or her inadequacies.
13) When push comes to shove, HR do what they are told to do by management, regardless of the rights and wrongs.
14) HR are sometimes an outsourced and contracterised profession with little influence.
15) The constant change, reorganisation, restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing, contracterisation etc mean that there is no continuity in treatment of staff and thus the bully is able to hide the fact that he or she has a history of conflict with employees.
16) Over the last few years employers have been burdened with numerous legislative changes (working time, data privacy, parental leave, etc) and have no desire, resources, time or energy to deal with issues for which there is no legal requirement.
17) Bullying cases are so long and complex (a situation the bully fosters) that most HR (and most people) don't have the time, energy or resources to unpick the case.
18) There are only a handful of people who are capable of providing HR with the training and insight to undertake a successful investigation.
19) Where HR want to investigate they are sometimes overruled.
20) HR (and management) are frightened of the serial bully too - and sometimes more frightened than the employees.
21) HR people get bullied too.
When organisational psychologist Mary Sherry wrote in a national newspaper last month that female managers were far more likely to bully staff than male ones it triggered a large reader response - almost all backing her view.
Why are some women much worse bullies than their male counterparts?
One female respondent to Shelly's article said: "Women bosses are worse bullies than men. I also agree with Sherry that usually they employ more insidious tactics such as isolating people and nit-picking in order to undermine the other person's confidence."
Another wrote: "Your article has provoked me to put down on record that the unhappiest years of my life were caused by female bosses. I was treated so badly that I lived in a state of fear for the last few years of my employment."
And a third said: "I work for a government department and have been off work since late October due to stress and anxiety exacerbated by a two-year campaign by my female line manager. Women bosses are certainly worse than men at bullying."
... ... ...
Their approach is a lot more subtle and psychological. They nitpick and undermine through constant criticism which leads to those on the receiving end losing their self-confidence and becoming risk and responsibility averse.
So who are these bully-girl bosses?
In Sherry's view they tend to be middle managers who are managing beyond their level of competence.
"For example when they are asked to perform at a certain level and don't have the managerial competence to get the best out of people they may bully. I don't think people actually decide to become bullies. It is because they don't have the competence to fulfil their management role."
And who, typically, are their victims?
According to Sherry the victim is rarely a new starter. They tend to have been employed for 18 months to 15 years. "A new female manager is brought in and undermines the person concerned by nit-picking and disempowering them."
She said that although it sounds like she is banging her own drum she does not think internal HR departments are best at dealing with serious bullying cases, especially if they involve senior staff.
"It is very difficult for internal investigators to look into bullying cases," Shelly said. "HR departments often don't have the level of delicate questioning techniques."
Stream: Girl power: are women the worst bullies?
This is an excellent article. Despite my not wanting to believe that women are the worst bullies, too much experience has taught me otherwise. Your article confirms what I have seen for the past 20 years.
Lisa Oakmonst
21 Feb 2005Female bullies
Anonymous
I totally agree with this article. As an HR manager for a charity, we have just dismissed a female manager for bullying.
The investigation into her behaviour completely backs up the evidence that she was working beyond her competence, which she hid very well until the investigation took place.
11 Feb 2005
Bullying - women are the worst
I can agree completely with Sherry's view of a female bully.
I was bullied in my previous workplace. The person who bullied me was my equal and was then made my line manager. I was subjected to constant criticism and nitpicking -it was mental torture. I called upon our Manager for help and was fobbed off.
I finally decided after losing all of my self confidence and being signed off sick with stress on anti-depressants that enough was enough.
Luckily I have a very supportive family who contacted our solicitor. I resigned and have claimed constructive dismissal. My case goes to tribunal in August 2005. I will have been left for two years eight months but the company in question have adjourned the case three times. Is this another game they are playing?
Lucy Lucas
L Lucas
08 Feb 2005
We hear so much of women as victims and the disadvantages women encounter in employment, that it sometimes comes as a surprise to realize that women are equally as capable of bullying behavior as men.
Women are supposed to be co-operative rather than competitive, more inclined towards empathy, and less towards seeking dominance. Women are often portrayed as caring more than men about personal experience and feelings.
It may be true that women are less inclined to indulge in vocalized rages - public swearing and shouting - and in physical violence, though I am sure that all of us could think of exceptions. Research indicates, however, that women are inclined towards
- The cold shoulder
- Refusing to communicate with the perceived offender
- Sulking
- Passive aggressive behavior - which respects neither the perpetrator nor the recipient.
Such behavior is evidence of women's socialization: often we do not know how to elicit positive attention, or to assert ourselves so that our views and rights are recognized and respected. So we use inappropriate and ineffectual means to attract attention any way we can. We have been conditioned very early that girls do not shout and scream. No one is surprised, however, if girls go quiet or even sulk.
The problem, however, is that unless people communicate, they will not resolve their differences.
What comes as a shock to many people is just how personally and educationally damaging social and professional isolation and exclusion from networks can be.
D Gray, Manager, Equal Opportunity, 2003
May be reproduced with acknowledgement
Whilst the focus of Bully OnLine is bullying in the workplace, the serial bully at work is a serial bully at home and in the community. All serial bullies have been through school and all have families and neighbours. An increasing number of enquiries come from people dealing with family bullying.
The violence committed by a serial bully is almost entirely psychological, for psychological violence leaves no scars and no physical evidence. Most commonly the violence takes the form of verbal abuse and emotional abuse including trivial nit-picking criticism, constant fault-finding combined with a simultaneous refusal to recognise, value, acknowledge and praise. Manipulation, isolation and exclusion are other favourite tactics, as is feigning victimhood or persecution, especially when held accountable.
The objectives of serial bullies are Power, Control, Domination and Subjugation. These are achieved by a number of means including disempowerment, the stimulation of excessive levels of fear, shame, embarrassment and guilt, manipulation (especially of emotions and perceptions), ritual humiliation and constant denial. When you live with someone who is constantly denying what they said or did a day ago, or an hour ago, or even a minute ago, it drives you crazy. When the symptoms of injury to health start to become apparent, the bully will tell others you have a "mental health problem". You may be mad, but this is not mad insane, this is mad angry.
Control is a common indicator of the serial bully at home - control of finances, control of movements, control over choice of friends, control of the right to work, control over what to think, and so on. All are designed to disempower.
A favourite tactic of the bully in the family is to set people against each other. The benefits to the bully are that:
a) the bully gains a great deal of gratification (a perverse form of satisfaction) from encouraging and provoking argument, quarrelling and hostility, and then from watching others engage in adversarial interaction and destructive conflict, and
b) the ensuing conflict ensures that people's attention is distracted and diverted away from the cause of the conflictBullies within the family, especially female bullies, are masters (mistresses?) of manipulation and are fond of manipulating people through their emotions (eg guilt) and through their beliefs, attitudes and perceptions. Bullies see any form of vulnerability as an opportunity for manipulation, and are especially prone to exploiting those who are most emotionally needy. Elderly relatives, those with infirmity, illness, those with the greatest vulnerability, or those who are emotionally needy or behaviourally immature family members are likely to be favourite targets for exploitation.
The family bully encourages and manipulates family members etc to lie, act dishonourably and dishonestly, withhold information, spread misinformation, and to punish the target for alleged infractions, ie the family members become the bully's unwitting (and sometimes witting) instruments of harassment.
Don't overreact. As much as we want to protect our kids, remember that it is not your fight. Outward intervention in many cases may make a bad bully situation worse. Many well-meaning adults intefere in their offspring's issues. In most all cases, a grown-up should remain neutral, listen, and offer some non-emotional responses about bullies and any bully threats.
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Last updated: January 22, 2010