Mobbing, Bullying, and Workplace Nastiness

By Ken Westhues

Published September 1999

The books featured on this page concern the most important advance in the study of work in the past twenty years. The advance consists in putting a name on and beginning to make sense of the most terrifying kind of injury a worker can experience, an injury that has until now gone largely unrecognized.

Actually, researchers use two names with overlapping meanings. Both refer to a distinctly human kind of harm: not wounds to the body suf­fered while attempting some risky task but wounds to a worker’s deepest sense of self, the loss of dignity and respectability, inflicted by supervisors or peers.

Both names refer to the tyranniz­ing of a worker by the employer: the exercise of power to rob the worker of self-confidence and self-worth. The organization’s resources are diverted from the official purpose (making money, healing patients, teaching stu­dents, or whatever else) and deployed instead to crush the targeted em­ployee.

The eliminative process can be triggered by many factors: discrimina­tion on ethnic, racial, religious, or gen­der grounds, envy of talent, fear of whistle-blowing, or panic in the face of overall organizational decline. Whatever the trigger, the process eas­ily acquires its own momentum and ends up doing irreparable damage not just to the targeted worker but to pro­ductivity and the workplace as a whole.

Mobbing

The name favoured in Europe is workplace mobbing: the process by which some number of workers and/ or managers join forces to humiliate one of their number. Like chickens in a coop, the mobsters gang up on some­body who is in some way different and peck him or her to death.

Social scientists have studied mobbing for decades, but mainly in com­munity settings, as when a citizen ac­cused of a crime is lynched or when a government is brought down by an angry crowd.

In the early 1980s, a German-born Swedish psychologist, Heinz Leymann, conceptualized and began to study mobbing in the small-scale setting of the workplace. He found that it happens to from one to three percent of workers at some point in their careers. If Leymann’s estimate is correct, most workers are at greater risk of psychological disability from the fanatic collective action of work­mates, than of physical disability from equipment or machines. As between toxic chemicals and toxic human re­lations, the latter are the greater threat to workers’ health and safety.

By the time he died in January of 1999, Leymann had completed some fifty investigations of workplace mob­bing and published his results in books and scholarly journals. He had also been instrumental in obtaining recog­nition of this problem in Swedish la­bour .law, so that Sweden’s National Health Service paid the cost of medi­cal and psychiatric treatment of em­ployees mobbed at work.

As a service to the general public, Leymann had also made the results of his research available—in Swedish, German, and English—on a website that, thanks to his colleague Sue Baxter, continues to be available: http://www.leymann.se/English. The site describes the mobbing process in detail, and gives practical advice for how to avoid it, prevent it, combat it, and recover from it.

A no less valuable part of Leymann’s legacy is the inspiration he gave to researchers elsewhere in their own attempts to understand workplace mobbing and devise pro­cedures for reducing its incidence and minimizing its ill effects. Four of the books featured here reflect that legacy.

(www.successunlimited.co.uk) ac­knowledges his debt to Leymann. The books by the Namies and by Davenport et. d are both dedicated to Leymann’s memory. Leymann wrote the preface to the latter shortly before his death, recom­mending it highly because it “sheds light on great suffering and proposes ideas to reduce this suffering.”

Bullying

Researchers in the U.S.A. and U.K. sometimes use the word mobbing but more often refer to bullying. Field and the Namies are examples. While recognizing the collective aspects of the eliminative process, they focus more on the gang leader, usually in a managerial position, for whom the hu­miliation of another becomes a per­sonal crusade.

In a workplace of bullies, one-upmanship and competition are pre­vailing norms and a cooperative atti­tude invites attack. In many troubled workplaces, Field reports, he has found what he calls a serial bully: a manager who can feel good about himself or herself only by putting some out a new target each time the previ­ous one has been destroyed.

Inhuman relations and jerks

Neither Bly nor Levine cite Leymann, and neither comes out of the tradition of research on workplace mobbing. Bly teaches literature and ethics. Levine is now self-employed and the architect of a splendid website, www.disgruntled.com.

Even if indirectly, Bly’s and Levine’s books complement the oth­ers featured here, by exposing and analyzing the nastiness that goes on behind the glossy, glitzy images that corporate public-relations depart­ments customarily project.

“A few bullies with enough toad­ies,” Bly writes, “can rule the world for years, decades, at a stretch.” In an especially rich chapter, “Genuine Jerks and Genuine Jerk Organizations,” she explains how and why life can be so bad in so many workplaces.

A key facet of the inhuman relations Levine describes is the inva­sion of workers’ privacy. “Big Brother is here,” he points out, “but Orwell got it wrong. It’s not the government that has stripped us of our privacy, but our employers.” Levine quotes Harvard professor Elaine Bernard: “As power is presently distributed, workplaces are factories of authoritarianism polluting our democracy.

Evil

Theologian Daniel Maguire us quoted on the cover of the book by Davenport et al.: “Until evil is named, it cannot be addressed. This book names mobbing, a common mayhem, and proceeds with brilliance to show its roots and possible cures.”

In one way or another, all the books featured her contribute to the naming process, which is the first step toward understanding the problem and intervening to prevent and correct it. We will be hearing more in coming years about the workplace mobbing and bullying. The Namies are spearheading the international” Campaign Against Workplace Bullying” (www.bullybusters.org), which is to be formally kicked off in San Francisco in January, 2000.