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Hostile Intentions
Risk & Insurance, Nov, 1999 by ANDREW R. McILVAINE
Unless managers take a proactive stance, hostile behavior in the workplace can lead to tremendous damage, both emotional and punitive, for workers and their employers.
For Ruth Namie, the honeymoon ended shortly after it began.
When she started work as a therapist at a drug and alcohol counseling center, part of an HMO located near San Francisco, her new supervisor, Sheila, seemed warm and supportive, asking Namie about her kids and offering career advice.
But soon, the relationship turned sour. It began with conflicts over counseling styles: Sheila, who was trained in the Freudian method of counseling, disagreed with Namie's more individually focused method. She was constantly criticizing Namie's decisions, arguing that she wasn't serving the patients properly.
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Tensions escalated when both women overheard a patient remark that he preferred Namie over her supervisor. Sheila began openly insulting Namie in front of other staff members and patients, berating her work methods and questioning her competence, despite Namie's more than 15 years of experience in the field. She made disparaging remarks about Namie's family--revealing problems that Namie had told Sheila in confidence. At one point, Sheila screamed at Namie after she walked out of Sheila's office in frustration.
The abuse began to take its toll.
"I would wake up every morning feeling nauseous," Namie recalls. "At work I felt paranoid, like I always had to watch my back. One day I went home and just started bawling."
Finally, Sheila succeeded in having Namie removed from her position without going through the normal procedures. Namie contacted a lawyer and ultimately settled with the HMO out of court. But the experience left scars.
"For months afterward I was in a state of depression," says Namie. "I was diagnosed as suffering from post traumatic stress disorder."
Seeking to understand what had happened to her, Namie, and her husband, Gary, searched for information on the Internet and discovered that Ruth had been a victim of a phenomenon that has received considerable attention in Europe but is only now being publicized in the United States--workplace bullying.
"I read some research papers that had been published in England and I said, 'Yes! This is exactly what happened to me,'" she says.
Workplace bullying, also labeled workplace aggression, consists of behavior toward a subordinate or coworker that is cruel, vindictive, and intended to humiliate and degrade. While studies measuring the extent of such behavior in the United States are rare, a survey of workers in 32 countries conducted by the International Labor Organization in 1996 found bullying to be one of the fastest-growing elements of workplace violence.
Bullying at the office comes in a number of different forms. Often, it's the abusive boss who constantly criticizes an employee, either because the boss considers the employee an underperformer--or the employee is an overachiever and the boss considers him or her a threat. But coworkers can be bullies as well, seizing every opportunity to make their target look bad in front of upper management.
"When you look at coworkers, there often isn't a power differential," says Chip Valutis, an organizational psychologist and co-owner of Valutis Consulting in Buffalo, N.Y "They don't nave legitimate means of influencing or controlling one another, so they seek out other means, and that can take the form of bullying."
Of course, abusive behavior in the workplace is as old as the concept of work itself. But some experts contend that the "lean and mean" organizational model so prevalent today is malting a bad situation worse. Bosses under pressure to meet tight deadlines with smaller staffs may take out their frustrations on underlings. The ones who prove the most effective at getting their staffs to perform are often the most valued--even if their methods include abusive behavior.
And while managers can help put a stop to the problem, the evidence so far suggests it isn't doing much.
Bulls in the Ring
For some years now the law has offered protection to employees who suffer racial discrimination and sexual harassment on the job, with remedies that can include punitive damages against the employer. But little-to-no protection exists for victims of workplace bullying.
"There's no law against cruelty" says Gary Namie, an organizational psychologist who has devoted a considerable amount of research to the phenomenon since his wife's experience and has developed a Web site (www.bullybusters.org) that offers advice and information on dealing with the problem.
That's because a bully's target can be anyone--black, white, male, or female. Unless the targets suffer abuse that is clearly related to their race or gender, there's no legal remedy available. And unless the abuse is physical in nature, it can be difficult to prove.
"If a manager is looking to tackle this, unfortunately the law doesn't give her much of an incentive to address it and, in that sense, employers can be held liable," says David Yamada, an associate law professor at Suffolk University School of Law in Boston.
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