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Workplace bullying: costly and preventable
Workplace bullying: costly and preventable
Workplace bullying: costly and preventable
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Workplace Bullying
This case study will focus on the psychological and physical effects of being bullied in the workplace both in person and through social media outlets. Until recently, I feel like workplace bullying has been seen as playful teasing. But people are now realizing that bullying is bullying and it is unacceptable regardless of one’s age or occupational position. This bullying ruins people’s lives and tears their confidence down. People are driven to quit their jobs or even go as far as committing suicide because of this harassment. Workers’ health is not the only thing affected by workplace bullying. Companies suffer because their employees are preoccupied with other worries and this causes them to be less productive. Unfortunately, there are no current policies specifically addressing workplace bullying, but I do believe that solid laws will be formed soon enough.
What is workplace bullying? What are the statistics?
Workplace bullying can be a very grey area. What one person may consider as being harmless, playful teasing, may not be that amusing to another person. “Workplace bullying has been defined as ‘the repeated, malicious, health-endangering mistreatment of one employee (the Target) by one or more other employees (the bully, bullies)’. To be identified as bullying, the behavior has to occur regularly, repeatedly, and over a period of time” (Harthill). According to the Workplace Bullying Institute's national scientific surveys in 2007 and 2010, 35% of adult Americans report being bullied at work. That comes out to an estimated 54 million workers (Work Doctor).
Workplace “bullying is four times more prevalent than illegal harassment” (Give Me), and yet, it is technically still legal. The U.S. is the “last...
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...e company to lose efficient employees and gain unnecessary extra costs. Even though there has yet to be an official law that specifically references workplace bullying, developments in the law are gaining momentum and hopefully, this will lead to a federal law in the next decade or so. But until that happens, because of the serious effects of bullying on employers and employees, it would be wise for companies to take internal steps to address workplace bullying through zero tolerance policies, training, and counseling. Bullying is a health and safety issue and employers have a responsibility to ensure the health, safety and wellbeing of their workers. Most importantly, it must be noted that bullying can thrive only in a workplace environment that tolerates it. This is why the workplace should make it a priority to promote a safe, trusting, and healthy environment.
It has various negative effects which are persistent in nature, and the individual victim realizes the behaviour as bullying (Wilson, 2016). Bullying is associated with physical and psychological problems among nurses leading to absenteeism, poor performance, low job satisfaction, and increased turnover (Ganz, et al., 2015). The issue of bullying among nurses further affects the entire health care team including patient outcomes and health care costs due to the declining level of nurses’ performance (Becher & Visovsky, 2012). Although bullying exists in the nursing work place, they are silent in nature, and goes undetected (Becher & Visovsky,2012). Hence, identifying and managing workplace bullying needs efforts of individual facing bullying and support of the
Workplace bullying is defined as any as any type of repetitive abuse in which the victim of the bullying behaviour suffers verbal abuse, threats, humiliating or intimidating behaviours, or behaviours that interfere with his or her job performance and are meant to place at risk the health and safety of the victim (Murray, 2009). Bullying can take many forms, some blatant, others more subtle. Researchers ha...
Workplace bullying is an issue at my current place of employment. It pertains specifically to my experiences and observations of a staff member who feels the need to demoralize and abuse her co-workers and patients. Her harsh mannerisms, including aggressiveness and manipulation had a negative impact on many staff
The psychoanalytic perspective (Erikson’s psychosocial stages), Sigmund Freud Ego or psychological defense mechanism, and behaviorism and social learning theory, are important to understanding adolescent bullying. In the psychoanalytic approach, development is discontinuous and as such occurs in stages where “people move through a series of stages in which they confront conflicts between biological drives and social expectations, and how these conflicts are resolved depends on the person’s ability to learn, to cope with others and cope with stress” (Berk 2010, p.15). According to Sigmund Freud from this theory, individuals use a mechanism called psychological defense mechanisms which when they feel an overpowering anxiety, the ego employs to protect themselves against unwanted, scary feelings or weaknesses within their psyche or consciousness. The use of these defense mechanisms can be useful sometimes and also hurtful at other times to us and others, which emanates as aggressive behavior e.g. bullying [2]. Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development are important for understanding bully behavior. According to Erikson, a “basic psychological conflict which is resolved along a scale from positive to negative determines a healthy or maladaptive outcomes of each stage” [Berk 2010, p.16], in other words as the child grows and goes through each of the psychosocial stages, he or she negotiates new cognitive and emotional experiences which enables him or her to pass through the stage with either a positive or negative outcome. The effects and results of a negative outcome from the stages can be used to describe aggressive behavior such as bullying [Berk 2010, p.16]. According to the behaviorism and learning theory, they believed that b...
The author of this paper has a pretty good understanding of her strengths and weaknesses, and genuinely believes in people. She believes that positivity and encouragement work far better than incivility and punishment. With her career goal of returning to trauma services and becoming a trauma coordinator, the author hopes she can include healthy workplace education in her future trauma prevention program. She would like to use her position as a Trauma Coordinator to reach out to employees and the community to encourage a healthy workplace. With disease processes such as hypertension, autoimmune disorders, depression, anxiety, and PTSD associated with workplace bullying (Healthy Workplace Bill [HWB], 2016), the author feels this education is beneficial, and compliments trauma prevention. Furthermore, she would like to bring some of the tools from the Healthy Workplace Bill (Healthy Workplace Bill [HWB], 2016) to the nurse practice counsel, shared governance committees, and organizational leaders. She would like bullying to be considered a never-event, much like hospital-acquired infections. By employing some of the tactics proposed in the healthy workplace bill, the author of this paper believes she can make a
According to Latricia Wilson, workplace bullying is the same as bulling for a child, they treat othe...
Downplaying bullying, saying things like “He was just joking around”, and “Don’t take things so seriously” can have serious repercussions. Some people are more fragile than others and react to this type of treatment with anger or violence. On the other hand, there are managers who rule with an iron hand and sometimes this pressure can cause an employee to crack.
Worth & Squelch (2015) define workplace bullying as, “the situation in which a person persistently is on the receiving end of negative actions from one or several others in a situation where the person exposed to the negative treatment has difficulties defending himself or herself against these actions” (p. 1017). Although we all may face many challenges in our lives every day; no one should ever have to experience this type of behavior from another employee. Workplace bullying is a very serious matter and should not be taken lightly, so organizations need to be able to recognize all forms of bullying, train employees on the consequences against workplace bullying, and have effective policies in place that will help prevent this type of behavior.
Bullying has always been a problem within the past century and has become an epidemic. However, because of social media people are becoming more aware of the issues associated with bullying and how it has become a trend in today’s society. You turn on the news and you are hearing about kids being bullied and the end result is suicide. Bullying is occurring worldwide. Not only is it happening in our schools and social networks, but also in the work place. The various types of bullying that exist and the attempt to entirely eliminate them is not achievable because of individual and environmental factors.
Bullying is a growing concern in a society where status and exercising power over another human being are increasingly important in developing one’s social circles. Dan Olweus (Norwegian researcher and founder of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program) defines it as an “aggressive behaviour that is intentional and that involves an imbalance of power. Most often, it is repeated over time” (Violencepreventionworks.org). School victimization is an especially delicate matter that has only really been in the public eye for the past half century, as more and more researchers and psychologists pointed out its short- and long-term negative effects on targeted individuals. It has since been widely investigated and numerous programs have been developed in an effort to address and prevent the many forms of bullying that exist today. The negative effects of such an abusive behaviour are various and can greatly differ from individual to individual. However, there are three main consequences that can be associated with school bullying, which are: school avoidance, depression/anxiety and even suicidal attempts.
“Bullying in the workplace is a term that refers to unfavorable treatment that an employee suffers at work, such as physical and verbal abuse, sexual harassment, discrimination, or intimidation. According to a survey conducted by the U.S. Workforce Bullying Institute in 2010, 53 million Americans suffer workplace bullying at some point during their careers. Unfortunately, as of 2011 there are no federal or state laws that specifically address bullying in the workplace except for sexual harassment, physical abuse, or discrimination.”
"Teenage Bullying." Stop Bullying, Harassment, and Anti-Bully in School/Work. 2013. Web. 29 April 2014. http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/teenage-bullying.html
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” These words have been repeated countless times, but they are not accurate. In truth, words can kill. Bullying has become a highlighted problem within our society, and bullying in the school systems is even more prominent. According to the news, there are countless cases of bullying, many of which do not have happy endings. The rates of suicide due to bullying are currently higher than they have ever been before. Suicide is the third top causes of death in young people within the United States, averaging at 4,400 deaths a year, with over 50% of these deaths as a result of some sort of bullying. Studies also show that there are 100 suicide attempts for every one successful suicide performed (“Bullying and Suicide”). These numbers are disturbingly high. Bullying is affecting more kids in ways that some adults may never understand. The fact that words and actions can lead to cutting and suicides is still a distant concept to some and needs to be brought to immediate attention. Laws are now being put into place to prevent these tragedies, but what is really being done to prevent them within the schools or even within the students’ homes? There is a lot of finger pointing when it comes to this topic. But we all want to know what the cause is behind this nationwide crisis and who is responsible for it.
Bullying in the work place seems to be on the rise. It also attracts much more attention in the media. Bullying is a phenomenon of unequal power. From the reading found that a concise definition for workplace bullying was not available in the literature and in the United States there was a lack of federal legislation addressing workplace bullying. This integrative review reports that bullying is categorized as work related, personal, and physical/threatening.
What is workplace bullying? According to the Workplace Bullying Institute “ 35 per cent of the U.S workforce repor...