The Workplace Bullying Handbook

How to Identify, Prevent, and Stop a Workplace Bully

Paul Pelletier

• Publisher: Paul Pelletier Consulting
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780995003637
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

Designed as an easy-to-read, practical handbook, the Workplace
Bullying Handbook is a single resource that focuses, firstly, on
how to identify and understand workplace bullies and,
secondly, provides action plans for organizations and all levels
of staff to enable them to effectively take action when we are
confronted with a potential bullying problem at work.

1

The Anatomy of Bullying

The time is always right to do what is right.

–Martin Luther King³

Bullying can be as harmful in the workplace as it is in schools and other areas of society, causing the well-understood emotional and physical impacts, plus a long list of challenges for employees and their organizations. More sobering are the clear and irrefutable statistics – workplace bullying is costing businesses billions of dollars annually. For every short-term result that a bully achieves, there is a list of longer-term negative business impacts that far outweigh any temporary benefits. To quote Patricia Barnes, a workplace bullying author, judge, and attorney, workplace bullying is likely the “single most preventable and needless expense on a company’s register.”⁴

A conversation about bullying should start with recognition of the ethical and leadership dilemma it creates. Hopefully, we all agree that supporting, condoning, or fostering bullying is unethical and not “what is right.” I have faith that the vast majority of us have a moral compass that directs us to immediately conclude that bullying and harassment of any sort is just plain wrong. You wouldn’t be reading this book if you disagreed with this perspective.

Further, I assume that we also accept that bullying isn’t a positive, effective, or ethical leadership style. Authoritarian and fear-based leadership might work on a battlefield, but our workplaces aren’t war zones. Employees shouldn’t be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress or have regularly occurring nightmares from treatment they received from a colleague at work. Going to work under a cloak of fear, chaos, and dysfunction caused by a bully leader is incompatible with the concept of good business practices.

It is a well-understood leadership principal that ethical behavior is part of an essential foundation for trust that we all must earn in order to succeed. This is not only my opinion – this perspective has been underscored by some of the most important thought leaders of our time. The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner is the gold standard for research-based leadership and is a premier resource for aspiring leaders. The text informs us that leadership requires trust:

It’s clear that if people anywhere are to willingly follow someone – whether it be into battle or into the boardroom, the front office or the front lines – they first want to assure themselves that the person is worthy of their trust.⁵

All our work is, for the most part, an activity undertaken in concert with others. While we may refer to these others as team members, stakeholders, or coworkers, we depend on them for the success of our organizations. If employees don’t trust or feel supported by their leaders, there will be no motivation or commitment to fully engage.

Following this logic and with many scholars and research in support, without ethical leadership (which includes sincerely and effectively responding to bullying) there will be few fully engaged and high-performance teams, and even fewer program, project, and innovation successes. Think of the organizational impacts that flow from this conclusion. Put simply, an organization whose leaders are bullies or whose leaders support the bad behavior of bullies working under them is an unethical organization with unethical leaders.

We’ve seen a significant increase in public awareness about ethics in our organizations and leaders. Sadly, much of the awareness has come through reports and investigations into globally significant organizations that have made extraordinarily bad ethical and leadership decisions (Volkswagen, Uber, Facebook, Wells Fargo, Samsung, and Miramax, to name a few). It has often taken years of abuse and well-known unethical behavior before the truth comes out (or, more importantly, these organizations and their executives have been caught and held accountable).

The most disturbing part of these stories is that almost all of the organizations have workplace respect, ethical behavior, and anti-harassment policies that are designed to ensure a safe, respectful, bully-free, harassment-free, and ethical workplace. Further, these policies supposedly protect employees from any inappropriate behavior that violates the rules. Staff are told they should report all bad behavior and they are promised that something will be done, the policy will be enforced, the culprits will be held accountable, and those who report the problem will be protected from retaliation.

Nevertheless – the experience for thousands of employees is that these policies rarely protect them. They are often unfairly and inconsistently enforced. Executives, human resources, and their legal counsel go into risk management mode, trying to protect their organization as opposed to the people who reported the problem. All too often, this results in bullies and unethical staff being the ones who receive protection.

Organizations will even go to great lengths to ensure the problem is “managed,” including paying victims/complainants to quietly leave the organization with a legal agreement binding them to never discuss the problem or settlement (often referred to as “hush money”). The short-sightedness of these responses to legitimate reports of workplace disrespect is remarkable and contrary to all ethical and business best practices.

Despite this historical trend, I believe there are signs of hope and opportunities to disrupt the status quo. For example, we’ve experienced a global shift in awareness and perspective on workplace harassment. Thanks to things like the #MeToo movement and the efforts of many courageous people, our organizations (and, hopefully, the broader society) are starting to take note. Traditional media and social media have put a lot of pressure on organizations to take action. In high profile cases, particularly in the entertainment, technology, and media sectors, it has resulted in some very public figures losing their jobs, careers, companies, and reputations.

It’s easy to say that this reaction to public pressure is both too little and far too late. Skeptics fairly note that the organizations in question were acutely aware their staff were being abused, sometimes for years or even decades. We’ve also learned that because of power imbalances, politics, and risk management strategies, the bullies, harassers, and badly behaved are often protected. In the worst cases, the CEOs or senior executives running the company are the bullies. In most cases, instead of confronting the problem, organizations terminate or move impacted staff, or ignore the issue through willful blindness.

Nevertheless, I believe that from these seeds of increased awareness sprouts hope that it will lead to real change. We have to be realistic and appreciate that it often takes years for these seeds to bear fruit. However, a movement for change has begun. We all can play our part and become respectful workplace leaders and colleagues. We can “walk the walk,” managing our own behavior and courageously responding when we see others behave badly.

We can take an active role in participating in the movement to eliminate workplace bullying. It won’t be easy or enjoyable but it is the right thing to do – for you, for your coworkers, for your workplace, and for society.

What Is Workplace Bullying?

Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.

–Kofi Annan,
Former Secretary-General of the United Nations⁶

From this place of hope, and with an enhanced appreciation that bullying is unethical and creating preventable negative impacts on our organizations, we can begin to study the behaviors of bullies. We can also create strategies for identifying and addressing bullying in our workplaces.

As strange as it seems, one of the most-asked questions I get is: “What exactly is workplace bullying?” This is entirely understandable because, as of the date of publication of this book, there is still no definition for “workplace bullying” in Merriam Webster’s Dictionary.⁷ There is a definition of “bullying” that includes all contexts of “abuse and mistreatment of someone vulnerable by someone stronger, more powerful, etc.” This definition doesn’t adequately describe or differentiate a workplace bully from a schoolyard bully. With all the research and discussion about workplace bullying, it seems unfathomable that there isn’t a proper definition for this term, especially considering terms can be found such as “pleather,” “sexting,” “LOL,” and other contemporary words.

After I gave a presentation on workplace bullying, a woman approached me in tears. She always wondered what was going on with her boss, but she simply couldn’t place her finger on a proper identifier for the daily attacks she was facing. It wasn’t until she saw a definition of “workplace bullying” that it became clear. The more examples of bullying behavior she heard, the more emotional she became. She told me the presentation lifted a massive weight off her – simply because she now had the right label to call her bullying boss. He wasn’t just “mean,” “spiteful,” “disrespectful,” or “unlikeable” – he was a workplace bully.

Given the lack of agreement on a common definition, we must rely on other sources to define workplace bullying. Fortunately, there are a number of highly respected and internationally renowned psychologists, professors, authors, and researchers on the subject, including Professor Ståle Einarsen (University of Bergen, Norway), Clare Rayner, Lyn Quine (University of Canterbury, UK), and Professor Sir Carey Lyne Cooper (University of Manchester, UK) to name a few. According to Einarsen, bullying at work means:

… harassing, offending, socially excluding someone or negatively affecting someone’s work tasks. In order for the label bullying (or mobbing) to be applied to a particular activity, interaction, or process it has to occur repeatedly and regularly (e.g. weekly) and over a period of time (e.g. about six months). Bullying is an escalated process in the course of which the person confronted ends up in an inferior position and becomes the target of systematic negative social acts.⁸

For those who appreciate a more concise definition, the Workplace Bullying Institute defines workplace bullying as:

Repeated, health-harming mistreatment, verbal abuse, or conduct which is threatening, humiliating, intimidating, or sabotage that interferes with work, or some combination of the three.⁹

Workplace bullying is mistreatment, perpetrated by an employee, severe enough to compromise a targeted worker’s health, jeopardize her or his job and career, and strain relationships with friends and family. It is deliberate, repetitive, disrespectful behavior that is always for the bully’s benefit. It is a focused, systematic campaign of interpersonal destruction. All bullying can be categorized as a form of abuse. In the bluntest of terms, it is workplace terrorism.

It is important to distinguish bullying from the inappropriate, one-time acts of someone who is under a great deal of pressure, having a particularly (and unusually) bad day or handling a disagreement poorly. It could also be a situation where a combination of poor communication skills, a lack of cultural awareness, or a lack of boundaries results in bad behavior, unfortunate language choices, or regrettable conflict management tactics. These circumstances lead to behavior such as an insensitive joke, an invasion of personal space, or inappropriate things said in the heat of a moment of lost patience, frustration, or anger.

These are single events, not a pattern. They arise from a unique situation that is easy to identify. The offenders, once they have a moment to calm down, reflect, or be informed of their gaffe, appreciate they have hurt another or acted inappropriately. They understand they have breached respectful workplace behavioral expectations. Always, they are embarrassed and, almost always, they quickly and sincerely apologize. They hold themselves accountable for their actions. They show authentic remorse and the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Anatomy of Bullying
• Chapter 2: Other Disrespectful Behaviors
• Chapter 3: Bullying Isn’t a “Leadership Style”
• Chapter 4: Who Are the Most Common Targets?
• Chapter 5: What Are the Most Common Bullying Scenarios?
• Chapter 6: The Impacts of Workplace Bullying
• Chapter 7: Is Workplace Bullying Illegal?
• Chapter 8: Employer Responsibility
• Chapter 9: Organizational Approaches to Workplace Bullying
• Chapter 10: Employer Response and the Effectiveness of Workplace Policies
• Chapter 11: Why Are Organizations So Ineffective at Managing Bullying?
• Chapter 12: Changing Employer Behavior: An Organizational Anti-bullying Action Plan
• Chapter 13: Individual Engagement: Laying the Foundation for Your Anti-Bullying Action Plan
• Chapter 14: Confronting Disrespect When it Starts
• Chapter 15: Anti-bullying Action Plans for Individuals
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• About the Author