Dignity at Work

Eliminate Bullying and Create and a Positive Working Environment

Pauline Rennie Peyton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135453053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión de recursos humanos

Bullying in the workplace is now a recognised problem, and a cause for major concern. Victims stand to lose their self-esteem, their health and even their careers. Organisations that do not endeavour to put an end to this behaviour lose productivity, profits and their good reputations.
Dignity at Work is derived from the author's many years of experience working with organisations of all sizes and at all levels. This book outlines practical guidelines essential to organisations that want to combat bullying in the workplace, and psychologists and professional counsellors working with those organisations. It provides:
* the tools to identify bullying behaviour
* expertise to create new policies and integrate them into corporate culture
* confidence to know when and how to intervene practically and therapeutically
* the skills required to know when to seek external help from professional counsellors
* psychologists and counsellors with advice on how to transfer their skills to organisations as independent contractors
Bullying will no longer be tolerated, and organisations must create environments that do not support mistreatment. This book provides managers, Human Resources staff and professional counsellors with the skills required to be able to recognise when a problem exists, and deal with it effectively.

Part 1: A handbook for Human Resources personnel, managers and corporate executives

Chapter 1: Why is bullying an important issue?

Behaviours that were still tolerated right up until the last decade of the last century are not necessarily acceptable now. Yet, in the face of change, even obvious and welcome change, for most of us the feeling is one of trepidation.

Coming to terms with my own resistance to change has given me some understanding of how the same phenomenon operates within organisations and the people inside them.

The prospect of change is no less difficult for companies than it is for individuals. Indeed, sometimes it is even harder. In spite of that, it is now time to stop paying lip service to the notion of dignity at work and start taking it seriously. The myriad reasons will be explained in the following chapters; suffice it to say for now that the general population is becoming increasingly aware of bullying in the workplace (as more cases are litigated in the courts and exposed in the national press). Together with this awareness also comes the understanding of just how dangerous and unacceptable this behaviour is. And yet, for all this exposure and the ongoing research, there is still not enough information ‘out there’ primarily because people are not recognising bullying behaviour when they see it and are not acknowledging its inappropriateness in today’s business world. Most of us working in the field agree that we do not know the extent to which people are suffering at other people’s hands.

Since Andrea Adams published her book Bullying at Work in 1992, research has been undertaken in this country and abroad, TV documentaries have been made, books written, and legal action against employers won. Yet, in spite of the greater awareness, bullying and harassment continue in the workplace, largely unabated.

Speaking at a conference sponsored by the British Trade Union MSF, Adams (1994a) said:

Isn’t it amazing the Employment Secretary has stated that the Government deplores workplace bullying, that it wishes to see employers adopt the most modern management practices, and would always encourage employers to treat their employees with the consideration they are due. If this were truly the case, how does one explain the apparent failure of so many organisations to protect their people from one of the most stressful, destructive, humiliating and financially undermining forces at large in the British workplace?

Sadly, she could give the same speech nine years on, since little has changed.

Cherie Booth QC, wife of the current British Prime Minister, speaking at a conference organised by ChildLine—the telephone help-line and charity—stated ‘Bullying doesn’t stop at the school gates, it goes on after school and it goes on into University. It goes on into work and it even goes on into the family. It is a real issue at the heart of our culture.’

As a society we are becoming more and more ‘me-centred’ and it is therefore not surprising that people treat each other with less and less respect. This is evident wherever we look: at the supermarket, the cinema, the bus stop or on the television!

We see children abuse each other on their way to and from school; we watch them push their way in front of the elderly waiting to get onto buses. We read of teachers being bullied and physically attacked by pupils and their parents. We hear of parents bullying their children and even of children bullying their parents.

Much of my work consists of short-term employee assistance programme counselling, in which I deal with diverse issues both personal and work-based. In the course of these assignments I have become increasingly aware of the effects of bullying and harassment both in the workplace and in people’s private lives.

The prime element that seems to be missing in these interpersonal relationships is respect. Therefore, at its most basic, what I am advocating is that the key to improved relationships is respect. In this book, however, I am concentrating solely on workplace relationships.

It is sad when people do not expect to be treated with respect either because of an inherited belief system or by being worn down by a particular organisational culture. For example, I think of the woman who said, ‘I’m only the typist’, or the man who shrugged, ‘I am only the odd-job man’. The truth is that both these people were successful and did their jobs professionally and with good grace. But unfortunately too few people respect their own—and others’—positive qualities but measure success only in terms of status, pay cheque and the car they drive.

Tim Field’s helpline—The National Workplace Bullying Advice Line—had 5, 156 enquiries and 4,598 cases of bullying during the period January 1996 to May 2001. This is just one agency. It is also important to remember that these statistics represent just the reported cases—most people, if they talk about it at all, tell only their families and friends. Usually they tell no one; they just leave their jobs. Clearly, the effects of workplace bullying are felt not only by the employee but by the employer as well.

In fact, the Health and Safety Executive claims that bullying is responsible for 30–50 per cent of all stress-related illness in the workplace, resulting in poor morale and productivity and higher staff turnover. The cost to employers is 80 million working days and up to £2 billion in lost revenue every year.

This book is not only about making people aware of the dark or shadowy side of organisational life, it also aims to guide people into doing something about it. Previously it may have been only in large corporations that the way in which people are treated—and the need to take action on bullying—was recognised. However, this is no longer the case and all employers of people have to be aware of their duty of care towards every one of their employees.

Many readers will be familiar with the following rationale: ‘We don’t worry about policies here. We are too small and, besides, I have run this show for 20 years and nothing like this has ever happened before.’ Needless to say, this comment was made by the managing director of a small company whose idea of management was encapsulated in another of his favourite sayings, ‘If you don’t like it, you know where the door is.’

Fortunately for people who are vulnerable, this attitude is no longer sustainable, as we have seen reflected over the last few years in successful litigation. For example, Oberhardt (1998) reports a case in which a woman sued the owners of a newspaper at which she had worked. She claimed to have suffered a psychiatric breakdown as a direct result of the abuse from her manager who had berated her with foul language, boasted of his ability to reduce women to tears and made false allegations against her. The judge found that the manager exceeded the parameters of his authority and agreed that the woman suffered a serious permanent psychiatric injury because of her treatment.

Results such as these confirm that unfair treatment of employees is now beginning to be taken more seriously in the mainstream. However, it is also true to say that most cases do not reach the press because companies being sued normally prefer to settle them out of court, thereby avoiding not only the adverse publicity but also the more comprehensive financial and legal consequences of losing the action.

Organisations that do not take the fair treatment of their staff seriously run the risk of having an unmotivated workforce, high levels of absences due to sickness, high rates of staff turnover and the threat of litigation. The ultimate consequence is the damage to their reputations as employers. This, in turn, can make recruitment more difficult and profit margins smaller, especially in areas where populations are less dense and the potential pool from which to attract a workforce is below the national average.

Nevertheless, all organisations need to identify, take responsibility for and resolve conflicts when they first occur. They need to ask questions such as ‘How can this situation be resolved swiftly, legally and with the least harm to all concerned?’

Many organisations have slick, empathetic mission statements and well-constructed company policies, which are neither read nor put into practice. Within your own organisation, how many employees know what the company mission statement says? How many believe it?

As an employee assistance professional who has been called in to deal with hundreds of short-term clients, I begin by asking ‘What does your company policy say regarding harassment and bullying?’ In my experience, the reply I get most often is that they do not even know whether one exists. Indeed, they are often surprised to see, once they get hold of a copy of the policy, that the behaviour they are enduring at the hands of others is not acceptable within their organisation.

When I run workshops or present papers at conferences, I usually ask the delegates to think about a time when they were either the person being bullied or a witness to incidents of bullying. To the question ‘Do you bully people or have you done so in the past?’ the surprising response is normally that 99 per cent admit to having been involved in some way.

Human Resources personnel are themselves by no means immune to the attentions of bullies. In a survey carried out by Robinson (1999) in Personnel Today, the magazine for Human Resources professionals, more than 70 per cent of the 331 personnel professionals involved in the survey reported having been bullied in their jobs. One third reported that they were currently being bullied and two out of five reported having witnessed a colleague being bullied. These people are at a particular disadvantage since the only person they can turn to is their immediate supervisor—and yet in 64 per cent of cases the bully is their immediate supervisor.

This only reinforces the necessity to have clear, unambiguous policies about workplace bullying and, no less crucially, systems and procedures in place to work alongside them.

Chapter 2: A background to bullying at work

What constitutes harassment and bullying?

The terms ‘harassment’ and ‘bullying’, and the differences between them, often confuse people. Although the terms are defined in greater detail in Chapter 3, both bullying and harassment consist of behaviours that are unwelcome, inappropriate, offensive, unreciprocated and irrelevant to work performance. Bullying is a specific form of harassment and is insidious by nature in the sense that it usually develops gradually (sometimes even imperceptibly until the pattern is established), but it has a cumulative, entrapping effect on the victim.

People can be harassed on the grounds of race, ethnic origin, nationality or skin colour, sex, sexual orientation, religious or political convictions, membership of (or non-membership of) trade unions and other apolitical organisations, status within the organisation, physical appearance (including disabilities), status as an exoffender or as someone suffering (or suspected to be suffering) from HIV/AIDS, education or just for being different. They can even be harassed for their willingness to stand up and challenge harassment.

However, we have reached a stage in organisational development where people have a right to expect to be treated well in their place of work.

In 1995, the TUC passed a motion condemning ‘the spread of bullying and hectoring management styles which intimidate, humiliate and dehumanize employees.’

Research on bullying at work

Back in 1956, Seyle stated that stress is ‘the body’s response to troublesome situations, events or thoughts’. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that being bullied at work has been found to be a major stressor.

Leymann (1990) put the effects of bullying under four main headings:

1. Social—social isolation, stigmatising, voluntary unemployment, social maladjustment.
2. Social/psychological—loss of coping resources. Petri (1997) calls this effect ‘breakdown of the mental nerve system’.
3. Psychological—desperation and total helplessness, considerable rage about lack of legal remedies, great anxiety and despair.
4. Psychosomatic and psychiatric—depression, hyperactivity, compulsion, suicide and psychosomatic illnesses.

Leymann (1993) carried out his research in Sweden on people seeking treatment for workplace-acquired illnesses of a psychological and psychosomatic nature. Based on over 500 cases in 1990, Leymann describes the medical history of the bullied victim. He found that after several days, symptoms of stress such as disturbed sleep and mild depression were in evidence and observed that over a period of six months this led to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). His clinical evidence shows that after a year the victim is diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) syndrome; after two to four years the condition becomes chronic and has, therefore, developed into a psychiatric illness. Later, Rayner (1997) quoted Leymann’s statistics that one in seven adult suicides in Sweden is the result of workplace bullying.

This work was reinforced by Bjorkqvist et al. (1994) who used the ‘Work Harassment Scale’ (WHS) on university employees and found that without exception victims claimed to have experienced feelings of depression, anxiety and aggressiveness as a direct consequence of the treatment to which they had been exposed. In all cases there were reports of insomnia, various nervous symptoms, melancholy, apathy, lack of concentration and sociophobia. Depression, anxiety and aggression scores of harassed employees were roughly one-third higher on the WHS scale than those of their colleagues. The conclusions of the study were that victims of harassment do suffer from PTSD.

Einarssen et al. (1994), quoted in Rayner (1997), found correlation between a high occurrence of bullying and ‘leadership style’ (in Scandinavian literature this refers to a lack of leadership), role conflict and work control. Insufficient work control and high levels of role conflict are seen to act as precursors to bullying. Those who are perceived as being responsible for the respective levels of control and role conflict may, where these levels cause problems, be seen as bullies.

Bullies are generally afraid of not being sufficiently in control and are often described by their teams as ‘control freaks’. A bully’s understanding of the concept of leadership is frequently distorted, which is why—instead of guiding their teams and fostering cohesiveness—their behaviour is over-controlling. This has psychological and physiological effects on their people.

Von Eckardstein et al. (1995) discusses how these detriments to psychological well-being lead to an impaired quality of life and a higher risk of psychosomatic illness. He suggests it has negative effects on an individual’s health and lifestyle (e.g., bad diet, addictions such as alcohol, increased conflicts and an increased risk of becoming ill).

Randall (1997) refers to the ‘noxious stimuli’ received from the bully that result in the persistent re-experiencing of the trauma. His findings are based on in-depth case studies.

Petri’s (1996) unpublished research showed similar outcomes. She suggests that the publication of case studies has helped bring the issue of workplace bullying into the open. This has certainly been the material that journalists have been attracted to and reported on in the general press.

In their research, Beasley et al. (1997) found a ripple effect from workplace bullying. The victims ‘lose interest in their families, be[come] irritable and even aggressive towards those whom they love’.

In line with this view, Petri (1998), in unpublished research, cites a case in which the family’s housing was linked to the bullied husband’s job. Here, the whole family was not only affected but indeed devastated by the impact of the employer’s behaviour.

In Austria and Germany, a number of studies on ‘mobbing’—another term for bullying—were undertaken. Zapf et al. (1995) in one study, and Niedl (1995) in another, investigated the mental-health effects of mobbing on employees. Both studies used a battery of psychological instruments (including the Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terrorisation) as well as control groups. The findings of the two separate studies were similar in that they showed significant differences between the mobbing samples and the control groups.

Zapf et al. agree that mobbing is an extreme form of work-based social stressor. They report that 54 per cent of cases received medical treatment.

Groeblinghoff and Becker (1996) refer to mobbing as an unethical disorder of communication and an extreme psychosocial stressor, the effects of which frequently cause severe symptoms of combined psychological and physical illness. They concluded that these symptoms impair the victims’ vitality, overall potential, creativity and productivity.

The results of their research through case studies were comparable with other researchers’ conclusions. They put forward the following list of outcomes: depression, obsession, agitation and blockage, a resigned attitude, moderate cognitive disturbances with automatically recurring thoughts, irritability, inner unrest, insomnia, substance abuse and suicidal tendencies.

In 1998 Cooper et al. listed mental symptoms of stress. According to Petri (1998) this list shows remarkable similarities to the symptoms reported by workplace-abuse victims. The relationships at work were then, and are now, of prime importance. What we now call bullying was ten years ago referred to as ‘office politics’ or ‘personality conflicts’. Petri concludes that in ten years the behaviour hasn’t changed but has merely been relabelled.

Petri (1998) quotes from a booklet issued...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the author
• Preface: Who this book is for
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: A handbook for Human Resources personnel, managers and corporate executives
• Part 2: The role of counsellors/psychologists in organisations
• Appendix I: Diagnostic criteria for 3.09.81 post-traumatic stress disorder
• Appendix II: Useful information
• Bibliography