Bullying at work: An unaddressed problem affecting millions in the American workplace

When the schoolyard bully is your boss, you might be at risk for health problems ranging from anxiety and weight problems to thoughts of suicide.

A new study being published in the International Journal of Stress Management says you are not alone if you experience bullying at work. It also points out that many of the common strategies used by people to cope with bullying may be counterproductive.

When confronted by a bully boss or co-worker, individuals tend to respond by avoiding the bully, seeking support from other co-workers and trying to reassure themselves. But those strategies, though useful in the short term, tend to perpetuate the problem and make things worse in the long run. That’s because they tend to reinforce a sense of victimization.

"It is understandable that employees wish to reduce the amount of their contact with an abusive boss to the minimum, but the strategies they use actually further increase their stress instead of reducing it," said study author Dana Yagil of the University of Haifa in Israel to LiveScience. "This may happen because these strategies are associated with a sense of weakness and perpetuate the employee's fear of the supervisor.”

She found that between 13 and 14 percent of American workers endure an abusive supervisor in a survey of nearly 500 employees. Abusive supervisors were characterized as those who humiliate and insult their employees, never let them forget their mistakes, break promises and isolate employees from other co-workers.

Research suggests that workplace abuse is linked to stress — and stress is linked to a long list of mental and physical ailments, including higher body weight and heart disease. When physicians urge their patients to lose weight, exercise more and reduce the stress in their lives, their exhortations may fall on helpless ears, as many bullied employees remain stuck in situation which exacerbate these conditions.

The stress of the bullying may actually itself lead to bad decision-making – or no decision-making. That’s because chronic stress may literally damage areas of the brain. Studies of chronically stressed-out rats have found that certain areas of their brains actually shrink as a result of the stress. Stress may actually re-wire the brain, and not in good way. The stressed-out individual may be reduced to the state of the abused spouse who feels she is left with no options as her depression and hopelessness deepen.

While not all cases of workplace bullying are necessarily so extreme as to cause brain damage, fully 70 to 80 percent of Americans report rudeness and incivility at work, and 41 percent report having been significantly harassed.

Hierarchical and highly competitive environments tend to have higher rates of bullying, as might be found in military or corporate environments. Research suggests that childhood bullies tend to become work bullies. Targets of bullying tend to be socially anxious personalities with low self-esteem.

There has been very little research on how to cope with workplace bullying. In cases of mild disrespect, researchers suggest a direct, polite confrontation about the offending behaviors. In more extreme cases, Sandy Herschcovis, a professor of business administration at the University of Manitoba, suggests reporting specific behaviors to higher-ups, as well as examining one’s own behavior. Sometimes our own behavior contributes to the bullying relationship. Of course, in many workplace situations, a bullying supervisor is in good standing with his or her own higher-ups and even perceived as a positive go-getter, so it is difficult to determine a course of action under those circumstnaces.

There are no anti-bullying laws on the books, so researcher in workplace aggression still recommend to proceed with caution, negating somewhat their own self-empowering recommendations.

"HR [human resources] has no power or clout to make senior management stop," said Gary Namie, a social psychologist who directs the Workplace Bullying Institute. "Without the laws, they're not mandated to make policies, and without the mandate, they don’t know what to do."

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Image source: Wikimedia Commons

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