No Workplace Bullies

Research from around the world indicates between 30% and 55% of employees report experiencing a bully at some point during their working lives. Some researchers even put it has high as 70-90%!  And, 30% of targets indicate they quit as a result.

The Workplace Bullying Institute's recent study indicates between 54 and 71.5 million Americans are victimized.

Bullying is conceptually defined as unwanted, recurring, indirect and direct negative messages and acts aimed at one or more individual, creating a perceived power imbalance and relative inability to engage in self-defense, resulting in some degree of psychological harm to the victims, witnesses and organization.

Bully Behavior  

Workplace bullies use a variety of aggressive communication tactics and behaviors in order to maintain power over others. Behaviors include, but are not limited to:

• Publicly ignoring, isolating and excluding peers

• Excessive micromanagement, even if not a manager or supervisor

• Intrusive management techniques (e.g., barging in or taking over projects assigned to target)

• Threatening punishment (e.g., “If you ever do that again I will have you fired”)

• Punitive or arbitrary punishment for simple things (e.g., being 2 minutes late to work results in reprimand)

• Excessive and rude teasing, ridicule, sarcasm, insults and humiliation

• Assigning work above level of expertise in an effort to make victims look incompetent to management

• Assigning work below level of expertise in an effort to frustrate victims and take away self-worth

• Giving unmanageable workloads and impossible deadlines

• Removing tasks imperative to victim’s job responsibilities (and self-worth) or assigning trivial or unimportant tasks

• Arbitrarily changing tasks or requests with no particular reason at all

• Consistent reminding of past mistakes, persistent criticism and belittling of opinions

• Gossiping, spreading rumors, making patronizing comments

• Failing to give credit when it is due

• Using employee evaluations to document target’s supposed decreased quality of work

• Using intimidating communication techniques

• Purposefully withholding work-based communication and information needed in order for victim to effectively fulfill job responsibilities

• Avoiding necessary interactions with victim

• Making false allegations and accusations about the victim’s work or personal life

Facts About Bullying

53% to 71% of bullies are in management positions.

That means between 29% and 47% of bullies are either peers bullying peers, or subordinates bullying superiors.

81% of victims report being bullied as a group by one single individual.

Oddly, when one individual is bullying a group, the behaviors tend to last longer than when a group is bullying a single individual.

The longer bullying goes on, the more severe and harsh the behaviors become, the more often they occur, and the more detrimental to the victim and witnesses they become.

62% of employers do not take action against the bully to protect the victims. In fact, most victims are fired or transferred and bullies often go unpunished or without reprimand.

How do bullies come to be?

While it is easy to believe bullies exist simply because there is something wrong them, in reality many factors contribute to the incidence of bullying. This includes the simple dynamic between the bully and his or her target, the organizational context and culture, the bully's personality, and the victim's personality. 

In terms of the bully specifically, relatively few studies have addressed perpetrators of workplace bullying; an irony Rayner and Cooper (2003) refer to as the “black hole in bullying at work research.” However, scholars do seem to agree that at the very least, bullies are definitely threatened by the people they bully and therefore lash out in an effort to regain the control they perceive to have lost.

Research has investigated perpetrators’ perceptions of the acceptability or justification of “rule-breaking” behaviors, and has come up with the following reasons one might bully others:

• Low levels of empathy

• Inability to handle stress well

• Having positive beliefs about the self and negative beliefs about others

• Immoral imagination (i.e., ability to assign positive value to other’s suffering)

• Desire for revenge

• Inability to communicate frustration, therefore resorting to aggression

• Lack of self-control

• Low self-monitor (i.e., unconcerned with what others think)

• Learned bullying behaviors from parents or other co-workers

• Narcissism

• Motivation for power

• Bureaucratic (i.e., need for strict rules and the desire to enforce them)

• Type A personality

• Jealousy

• Theory X orientation (i.e., belief that others are lazy and will avoid work, therefore requiring close supervision)

• Low self-esteem

• Sociopathic tendencies (i.e., aggressive impulses, gain satisfaction through antisocial behavior, lack remorse)

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"Thank you so much for giving us tips to better understand why bullies thrive at work, why some of us become targets, and how to avoid being walked all over. I really enjoyed today's workshop! Thank you again!"

Jeannette Fermin, Workshop Attendee