The Bully-Free Workplace E-Book

Gary Namie

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 220

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

At long last a guidebook for employers that discusses workplace bullying from America's unrivaled leaders and creators of the workplace bullying consulting institute. Managers will learn how and why to stop bullying; prepare executives to lead the campaign and to resist undermining efforts of subordinates; and create a new, positive role for human resources. Outlining the required steps, The Bullying-Free Workplace includes information on how to create a preventive policy that brings consequences, like never before, when violated. The authors discourage half-hearted, short-term fixes that are prevalent today, and present their signature Blueprint methodology to successfully protect employee health and eradicate the psychological violence from organizations.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Robert I. Sutton, PhD

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1: Bullies and Bullying

What's in a Label?

It's Not Just about Bullies

The Context for Workplace Bullying among other Negative Conduct

Bullying Can Kill Your Organization

Chapter 2: Workplace Bullying Defined

A Working Definition

International Origins

National Prevalence

Tactics Used by Bullies

Chapter 3: Impact on Targeted Employees

Health Harm

Disrupted Social Lives

Economic Harm

Chapter 4: How Bullying Kills Good Organizations Like Yours

Unaddressed Bullying Exposes the Organization to the Risk of Violence

Turnover of the Wrong People

Turnover Rates Are Uneven across Units

Bullies Expose the Organization to Litigation Risk

Disability Costs Rise

Absenteeism/Presenteeism

Intangible Costs for Good Employers

Is It an Epidemic?

Still Legal in the United States after All These Years

Chapter 5: An Illustrative Case

Background

The Start

Chapter 6: Why Bullies Bully

Causes That Cannot Be Corrected

Biology and Early Life Experiences

The Bully's Personality

The Target's Personality

The Power of Place over People

Chapter 7: Social Influence: How Others Define Our World for Us

Witnesses and Bystanders Who Enable Bullying

Role-Dictated Behavior

Chapter 8: A Model of Preventable Causes of Bullying

Part 1: Cutthroat Culture

Part 2: People Mix

Part 3: The Employer Response

Chapter 9: Mobilize Your Organization: Leaders’ Preparations

It's a War

Preparing Leaders, Preparing Yourself

Leader Task 1: Recognize the Bullying around You

Leader Task 2: Trust Reports from the Trenches

Leader Task 3: If You Are the Problem, Admit It and Stop

Leader Task 4: Support the Antibullying Campaign

Leader Task 5: Embrace the Value of Employee Health—Physical and Psychological

Managing Psychosocial Factors in the Workplace

Psychosocial Factors and Stress and Trauma

Good Managers and Leaders Should Control Psychosocial Factors

Preparing the Governing Board

Chapter 10: Mobilize Your Organization: Managers’ and Supervisors’ Preparation

Overcome the “Boss Problem”

Manager Step 1: Recognize Bullying

Manager Step 2: Intervene Whenever Possible

Manager Step 3: Stop Rumors

Manager Step 4: Hold Executives Accountable for Bullying

The Special Case of Women Bullies and Their Women Targets

Chapter 11: Preliminary Steps to Address Workplace Bullying

Poor-Quality Partial Steps

Positive Preliminary Steps to Take

Making the Case for a Comprehensive Solution

Chapter 12: A New Role for Human Resources

Chapter 13: The Namie Blueprint to Prevent and Correct Workplace Bullying

Step 1: Assess

Step 2: Create the Policy to Prevent Bullying

Step 3: Develop Informal Solutions

Step 4: Formal Enforcement Procedures to Correct Bullying

Step 5: Provide Restorative Justice

Step 6: Deal with Confirmed Violators

Step 7: Get the Word Out

Step 8: Optimize Accountability

Chapter 14: Sustain the Bully-Free Culture

Avoiding Trips and Traps in the Future

Train Interveners and Encourage Altruism

Don't Allow Antibullying to Become “Fad of the Month”

Build Your Bullying-Free Workplace Brand

Appendix A: Macro-Bullying Trends That Make Workers Dispensable

Globalization

Privatization of the Public Sector

Commoditization of Labor

Elimination or Prevention of Unions

Appendix B: The Namie & Namie Bibliography

Publications

Research Studies

Appendix C: Bullying Is Domestic Violence when the Abuser Is on Payroll

Notes

About the Authors

Index

Services Provided by the Namies

Copyright © 2011 Gary Namie, PhD, and Ruth F. Namie, PhD. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-0-470-94220-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-06724-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-06728-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-06729-1 (ebk)

To Ike, beloved by all

“Bullies cannot exist unless the Employer tacitly permits or encourages bullying behavior.”

—Bernice L. Fields

Foreword

Gary and Ruth Namie are heroes. No one has worked harder, longer, and more successfully to stem the tide of workplace bullying in the United States and beyond. They started with a more general approach with The Work Doctor®, but narrowed their focus some 15 years ago to become the world's leading crusaders against the “jerks, weasels, and snakes” who infect our organizations—and for too many of us—the teams and workgroups that we find ourselves in at this very moment. This book, The Bully-Free Workplace, brings together their wisdom, passion, dedication to hard facts, and relentless attention to practical solutions.

Many crusaders become so wrapped up in their goals that they lose the ability to make fact-based decisions and to give valid advice. The Bully-Free Workplace does a splendid job of avoiding this problem, bringing the most rigorous evidence available to the table. One of the most difficult problems associated with studying workplace abuse and related topics is that there are so little valid data about prevalence and patterns. We all should be skeptical of web-based surveys that are answered by biased samples, which often reflect a dedication to some political motive rather than to discovering the truth. By far, the most useful and rigorous surveys on bullying have been conducted by the Namies' Workplace Bullying Institute in conjunction with Zogby, a respected survey research firm. The results of this research are important in many ways, showing, for example, the huge amount of money that workplace bullying costs organizations and the diverse ways in which such abuse damages victims' emotional, physical, and financial well-being.

In particular, these studies provide strong evidence to justify the Namies' focus on organizations and people in positions of power as root causes of workplace bullying. Yes, the Namies show how personality and upbringing can play a role in creating people who are prone to bullying their peers and followers. Yes, they provide detailed and useful advice about how victims can fight against their tormentors. But I believe that the most important and impressive contribution of this useful and compelling book is that it demonstrates that when workplace bullying happens, the organizations where it happens (and the people who have leadership and managerial positions in them) are the primary culprits and even more important, the primary point of intervention for creating bully-free workplaces.

Perhaps the single most important takeaway for me was, as the Namies' advise in Chapter 5, that leaders and organizations ought to start by drawing a firm line in the sand. Drawing a line in the sand, as the Namies show us, is so important because even small incidents of bullying—those little glares and insults, for example—are dangerous signs that more vile and damaging behavior exists or will be tolerated. Once the decision has been made to draw a line in the sand—to me the single most important decision—then both the motivation and logic for building a bully-free workplace start falling into place. Then the range of powerful methods that are proposed and explained here can be applied to each context.

In particular, I urge every boss to study the Namies' list in Chapter 5 of a dozen ways to intervene when bullying incidents happen. Unfortunately, this list runs counter to what happens in most organizations that I know, and if just this set of practices alone were used widely, enormous progress would be made toward building workplaces where jerks, weasels, snakes, and tyrants either change their ways or run for the exits. Consider the Namies' vehement advice: “Do not attempt to put the bully and target across the table from one another to find common ground (mediation) unless the bullying has caused no severe consequences for the target.” Yet, time after time, bosses and victims tell me horror stories about the results of forcing victims and their tormentors to “work it out together” even though the victim is terrified of the bully and—especially in the case of smart, powerful, and deluded bullies—such conversations provoke a round of revenge that makes the victim suffer even more.

This is just one small example; The Bully-Free Workplace is chock full of other equally useful tips. I especially like how the Namies take considerable pains to show how people in positions of power often do things that unwittingly make it safe for bullies to do their dirty work or, worse yet, are bullies themselves (but are unable or unwilling to admit it to themselves). As I've written elsewhere, especially when people are in power and work under severe pressure, the chances that they will act like assholes and treat people with less power like dirt are quite high. The Namies provide remarkably helpful action steps—developed through their years of practical experience—to help workplace bullies, and those who enable these jerks to do their dirty work, to reverse their vile and destructive ways. I was especially pleased to read that “We've been tough on executives with our candor that they need to stop coddling friends who are bullies. We even invited them to gauge whether or not they are the problem themselves.” The next step is for people in power to be as tough on themselves as the Namies are on them!

Finally, not only is the Namies' book well crafted and useful but, as I read it, I realized how much progress this duo has made in the last 15 years (many others have helped, but they've been the most persistent, at least in the United States). They have brought workplace bullying center stage through their writings, proposed legislation, media appearances, expert witnessing, rigorous research, and via so many other ways. As a result, there is now more hope for the victims of bullying than when the authors first started on this crusade. Cynics sometimes suggest to me that it is a waste of time to write and talk about workplace assholes because no matter what anyone does, these jerks will always be with us. The Namies' accomplishments ought to give even the most pessimistic of these cynics cause for optimism. It's a lot harder to get away with being a bully than it used to be. Organizations and their leaders worry about it more than ever before. Victims don't feel alone any longer, and there is an increasingly long and effective list of ways victims can fight back against their tormentors. More than anyone else, we have Gary and Ruth Namie to thank for these improvements. And we have every reason to believe that our workplaces will continue to become more humane as the Namies persist in their crusade and inspire everyone from executives to workers to union leaders to lawmakers to join them on this quest.

—Robert I. Sutton, Stanford Professor and author of The No Asshole Rule

Acknowledgments

Suffolk University Law Professor David Yamada deserves special mention as a partner in the movement for over a decade. His legal treatise in 2000 introduced workplace bullying to the legal lexicon. He is the author of the Healthy Workplace Bill (HWB). David has worked tirelessly in Massachusetts as educator, advocate, and founder of the New Workplace Institute.

Because our work is evidence-driven and research-based, we are indebted to several researchers. Their work is cited throughout the text and in the Notes section. We express thanks to a special few whose work, more than others, informs ours—Peter Schnall, Stale Einarsen, Loraleigh Keashly, Helge Hoel, and Charlotte Rayner.

The legislative campaign is accomplished by a network of volunteer State Coordinators who are the boots on the ground. Every legislative season, they are more successful as amazing citizen lobbyists. When an antibullying law for the workplace is eventually enacted, they deserve the credit. There would be no nationwide campaign without them, and we are grateful.

Our work in organizations is made possible by the countless internal champions who fought uphill battles to bring us into their workplaces. The Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention, Cindy Waitt, director, funded the nation's first Workplace Bullying in Schools intervention, proving that adults in schools deserve to work in a bullying-free environment, too.

At WBI, we have accomplished small miracles with the help of a too-low-paid staff in recent years—Jessi Brown, Dave Phillips, Noelle Stransky, Carly Morris, and Noel Newell. They accepted jobs but actually serve at the front lines of the national movement. Helping us help organizations implement the Work Doctor® Blueprint program is our team of consultants—Dr. Matt Spencer, Sean Lunsford, Carrie Clark, and Betty Wierda.

This book was a dormant project on a long-postponed “to do list.” Wiley editor Lauren Murphy recognized the appropriateness of the timing and prodded us into action. She and editors Christine Moore and Deborah Schindlar have made the book understandable. Renee Maine and Jessi Brown also generously offered editing help.

Preface

Ever since Ruth's experience as a mental health provider in a psychiatry clinic, where she was ravaged by a female supervisor, our lives have been immersed in others' misery. Everyone we have met in the past 14 years since launching the U.S. workplace bullying movement has been touched in some way by bullying. They seem to find us everywhere we go. And although it's certainly been fraught with difficult moments, it's been incredibly uplifting as well.

We've helped the media tell more than 900 heartfelt stories about the plight of individuals bullied at work. We started our work in mid-1997 and hosted a toll-free help line. We heard the stories that flooded our phones in excruciatingly painful detail, one hour at a time. We stopped counting at 6,000 tales. The movement was necessarily framed through the lens of the abused worker. The research done by those of us at the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) and our academic colleagues has focused on targets' experiences, because they are the ones readily available for study. Bullied individuals, however, cannot change their employer's practices from the bottom up. It takes leaders within organizations to do that.

We both had had stints as corporate directors in human resources departments in the hospitality and health care industries, which helped to complement our clinical and management professorship roles, respectively. For more than 25 years, we have crafted all kinds of consulting solutions for businesses such as The Work Doctor®. We moved to an exclusive focus on workplace bullying solutions as described in this book when our lives were irreversibly detoured by bullying.

Increased awareness and a future legal mandate have convinced today's employers to finally take action against this timeless, ever-present problem. In 1998, few organizations acknowledged that bullying even existed, let alone took steps to stop it. However, the market is catching up. With the exception of employers in the provinces of Quebec, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Manitoba, North American employers do not face legal repercussions when they choose to ignore internal reports of bullying. Empirical findings from the WBI national surveys propelled the dialogue about bullying, and denial began to fade. The Healthy Workplace Campaign, which we launched in 2002, has led 18 states to introduce some version of our antibullying legislation. After the senate chambers in both New York and Illinois passed the bill in 2010—only halfway to passage—employer interest in voluntarily controlling bullying rose significantly. We believe that employers are finally ready for this book.

A feature of the best laws, specifically, our Healthy Workplace Bill (HWB), is that the threat of litigation provides the leverage that convinces employers to take voluntary action. The HWB exempts good organizations from liability for the harm caused by abusive employees when those employers develop and establish policy and enforcement procedures as described in this book. So, this book provides the path to compliance with the future law.

Millions of workers who currently suffer at the hands of an abusive boss or coworker will get the relief they deserve when employers understand that it is in their best interests to stop bullying. Only employers can affect the masses—and they shouldn't wait until there is a legal incentive to do so.

Right now, an antibullying advocate in hiding lurks inside every organization. Given the fact that you have purchased this book, chances are that you are that lone person in the organization who has been eager to tackle this issue. You are likely sickened by what you have witnessed. Maybe it has happened to you, and you escaped to safety; or perhaps you were told to identify solutions by a higher-up who cares. In either case, we wrote this book for you, the internal champion. Be aware that you have much alliance building to do before executives willingly endorse a program to stop bullying. We've included a section on mobilizing your organization to focus on the support-building phase of the project. That's the preamble, or the warm-up. Details on exactly what needs to be done—the explicit “how-to” instructions—can be found in the Blueprint.

We love champions. People like you seek our guidance every day. So, we know that we must warn all antibullying advocates: there will be enemies within your organization. They will expend unlimited time and energy to undermine your admirable work and will attempt to defend the abusers' “right” to abuse. Although bullying is a totally irrational and indefensible process, bullying apologists defend their friends with no regard for what is good for the enterprise or public agency. Furthermore, they seem not to care about the detrimental effect on the targeted employee's health. Do not be surprised at how heartless they can be.

Advocates like you are on a moral mission, and unfortunately, capitalism has no morals. Some believe that the modern corporation acts very much like psychopathic individuals. This phenomenon is the conflict that maintains bullying as a routine way of doing business. That is why the forces against you are united and strong; they have the status quo on their side. So gather allies; do not be the lone advocate. Make sure you have a high-ranking friend who is disconnected from the worst bullies. That person—the authentic leader—is the one who can convince others to take action to stop bullying. That leader can take credit for sustaining the organization for the long run.

This book cannot prevent your career assassination. Nevertheless, it is your guide to finding the right leaders for the initiative to purge the jerks, weasels, and snakes from your organization. Welcome to the movement—the employer-based version. Get started today. The task ahead is enormous.

Chapter 1

Bullies and Bullying

Work is, by its very nature, about violence to the spirit as well as the body. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

—Studs Terkel

What's in a Label?

You obviously picked up this book for a reason, and it's likely that one or more jerks, weasels, or snakes works for or with you. It would almost be laughable—that is, if the consequences of their negativity were not so destructive to those they hurt.

What shall we call these perpetrators of organizational chaos? Here are some synonyms for bullies: aggressors, mobbers, offenders, backstabbers, saboteurs, harassers, nitpickers, control freaks, obsessive critics, terrorists, tyrants, perpetrators, and abusers.

Regardless of the names by which we refer to them, these individuals exhibit conduct far beyond acceptable workplace behavior. They act in non-normative, readily identifiable manners that stand out in extremely negative ways.

The reason you've identified a problem is because you've been able to put a label on the jerk where you work. When you say weasel, there is consensus about who fits the description. To call someone a snake speaks to the person's deviousness and backstabbing maneuvers.

Throughout this book, we will rely on the simplest of all labels—the bully. It is one we have all lived with since childhood. We shall call all perpetrators, across a wide spectrum of potential negative deeds, bullies. To us, it is no more negative to call someone a bully than it is to brand them using any of the synonyms already suggested. We use the term bully as shorthand, not to demonize. To nearly everyone, bullying means that something wrong or unacceptable was done—and that we can identify the one who did it.

Nearly all nations recognize the term bully or have some cultural variation of it. And believe it or not, the United States is the last among all Western industrialized nations to acknowledge workplace bullying. We're finally joining the rest of the world when we identify the acts of perpetrators of anticorporate, antiorganizational, and antiworker aggressive actions as bullying.

The power of the term bully in the workplace is illustrated by people's reaction when it is used to label them. They usually respond strongly, with instant outrage and denial. They take the label as an insult. Yet it is the bullies themselves—and their deliberate misconduct and nefarious undermining—who insult ethical coworkers who care more about work than workplace politics.

It's Not Just about Bullies

Let's state at the outset that your task is not to identify offenders within your workforce and immediately brand them as bullies. We're not interested in leading you on this kind of witch hunt. Instead, what you will do—if you follow our suggestions in the blueprint—is create a way to identify whoever dares to violate a new, clear set of standards. That person, once detected and confirmed as a wrongdoer, is referred to as a “policy violator.” This is much less pejorative than the label bully and a better fit in your (now) bullying-free organization.

There's quite a difference between focusing on bullies and focusing on bullying. Trying to change bullies is a fool's errand. However, if you concentrate on stopping the practice of bullying, your leadership quotient will skyrocket, thanks to the gratitude of so many (currently silent) employees. The first task—to change a bully—falls into the domain of spouses, life partners, and psychiatry. It's not your job to do this for an employee or colleague. Yet it is up to authentic leaders to engineer organizational solutions, and bullying presents ample opportunities to do so.

The Context for Workplace Bullying among other Negative Conduct

Figure 1.1 represents the range of negative behaviors that occur in the workplace—and what can happen as a result of these actions—and places bullying into that continuum. We start on the left, with the least offensive and injurious types of negative behavior, and end on the right, with homicide. Although people who act inappropriately may think they're funny, they frequently say and do stupid things, thus revealing their own lack of knowledge about how to act in public.

Figure 1.1 The Continuum of Negative Interpersonal Behavior

Uncivil people violate social norms. They are typically aware of what constitutes “proper” conduct but choose to ignore the limits of acceptability when in the presence of others. They act as though unspoken rules apply to others, but not to them, and they may not feel normative pressure from the group like others do. Working with an uncivil coworker brings rudeness and boorishness—not necessarily aimed at anyone in particular—into your workplace. It's difficult to be a target of incivility because it is not personalized. Research by Christine Pearson, the academic most closely identified with the study of incivility, found that only 12 percent of workers subjected to an uncivil workplace contemplated leaving. Incivility is only mildly bothersome, hence its location on the continuum.

Disrespect is more hostile and is pointedly aimed directly at another person. It can trigger distress as well as a host of anxiety-related health complications. The perpetrator—the person who's “dissing” another—acts in a manner that shows complete disregard for the target's humanity. It is as if the recipient has not earned the right to be treated well from the perpetrator.

Our experience has found that U.S. employers will tolerate the labels incivility or disrespect when referring to bullying, whereas Canadian employers are less likely to make euphemistic references to these situations. In other words, Canadian employers are not afraid to refer to bullying as bullying.

On the interpersonal behavior scale, mild bullying falls to the right, on the more harsh impact side of disrespect. Mild instances can be covert and infrequent. Bullying becomes moderate to severe when bouts of mistreatment increase in frequency and personalization. Bullies tend to “zone in” on the targeted few, causing their misery to grow exponentially. Compared with incivility, bullying is a laser-focused, systematic campaign of interpersonal destruction—one of warlike dimensions. Methods escalate in abusiveness, and escape routes for targets are blocked. Bullies even recruit coworkers to further spread the misery. And as hatred progresses, the targeted individual grows sicker from multiple stress-related health complications.

Workplace bullying is not merely hostile; it's abusive. And abuse is potentially traumatizing. The result is frequently destabilization—in the form of threats to one's self-identity—when abusers attempt to redefine the target's personality in ways to suit them. It is an extremely invasive tactic. If the target cannot find a way to alleviate the strain, he or she can quickly slide into despair. If hopelessness follows, the person might consider the option of violence.