Bullying: Difference between Harassment and Discrimination - Assignment Example

Running Head: BULLYING DIFFERS FROM HARASSMENT AND DISCRIMINATION Bullying Differs From Harassment and Discrimination In That the Focus Is Rarely Based On Gender, Race or Disability [Author's Name] [Institution's Name] Bullying Differs From Harassment and Discrimination In That the Focus Is Rarely Based On Gender, Race or Disability Throughout the world a pattern is rising of how interest in bullying at work grows. Normally it starts with press reports on some rather appalling incident of people being treated badly at work. This is followed by a study which reveals the degree to which common people come across negative events in their working lives in that country. The ensuing publicity generates further interest, and often replica or improved studies are undertaken which ascertain with more certainty that there is 'something' going on (or not) in our working environments. In Britain the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) can take credit for being a very important element in our growing awareness. The BBC ran a radio documentary programme in 1990. In this programme Andrea Adams (a freelance journalist) introduced the topic and played taped interviews of people talking about their negative experiences at work. Despite the fact that the programme was broadcast during the evening which is not a peak listening time, it provoked a strong response from the public. Andrea Adams continued her work on the topic. She wrote an excellent book for targets of bullying which was published in 1992. Whilst the media has played an extremely important role in heightening awareness, a less positive role can be given to the management training community and its allied organisations. Mainstream management texts rarely contain any reference to bullying at work, and certainly are scant of suggestions as to what to do about it. In most countries there is no law against harassment, even though seemingly legal claims under race and gender legislation can have bullying at their base. Research reveals that UK laws at least are being stretched to embrace bullying (Earnshaw and Cooper 1996), but this strategy is particularly difficult for white men to follow as they fall outside the discrimination laws. International law may alter this as trading blocks include a social element which includes employee rights. As such, the issue normally remains limited to our workplaces and the media, whilst government and the legal profession have yet to deal totally with it. In common with racial and sexual harassment, definitions of workplace bullying extend to the reaction of the person receiving the behaviours. Effectively this takes matters outside the control of the person who does not want to be 'accused' of bullying. Most definitions would include the targets of the behaviour reacting negatively to the behaviour they have experienced. There are various factors around this issue; the nature of the negative reaction, the extent of reaction, and the harshness of the effects of the reaction (for example feeling highly goaded or very terrified). While this is a very wide spectrum of possible response, from being very distressed by the actions of others through to a full collapse, it is all negative in nature and effect. In order to arouse action to deal with bullying at work, it is necessary to have a patent idea of the scale of the problem. This chapter reports the latest findings on the occurrence of bullying in Britain. It will become clear that bullying is a very important workplace problem affecting a large number of people. This is mostly the case when we widen our perspective to include those who are affected indirectly, such as the bystanders of bullying incidents. Particular industries and occupations that seem to be 'high-risk areas' for bullying will be identified in this chapter. We will also observe how factors such as gender, age, and ethnicity might have an impact on the experience of bullying. Do people who are of a certain age, for example, get bullied more, or less Do managers get bullied more than front-line workers For how long are people bullied Do people get bullied on their own, or in groups Bullying is not an abstract occurrence but relates to the experience of negative behaviours. We will take a closer look at these behaviours; explore what they may have in common and how frequently people experience them. Individuals react differently, and we will see how they try to deal with their experience. How can we explain the figures in the high-risk sectors In the case of the prison service, the presence of internal organisational problems and conflicts, particularly between management and staff and between different groups of employees have been highlighted (e.g. Power et al. 1997). Prison staff has been accused of using unacceptable methods, possibly of a bullying nature, against inmates or other members of staff (Guardian 2000). In addition, the 'bullying label' has been used actively by prison staff for a number of years in order to describe relationships between inmates. These factors may make it easier for staff to use the label, and to consider negative behaviour to be bullying. Explaining specific differences may be a topic for other studies and here we would be concerned that placing too strong a focus on the 'top league' of bullying may deflect from the more important finding that bullying appears to be a problem throughout the workplace. Various studies have investigated the duration of bullying. In the UMIST study the researchers focused in particular on the long-term duration of exposure to negative behaviour and its association with the damage that bullying seems to inflict on targets (see Chapter 3). Figure 2.3 shows data from the UMIST study. Readers' attention is drawn to the high number of people for whom the bullying has been going on longer than two years. For some respondents the episode that began the bullying process may be easy to remember. In such cases it may be relatively straightforward to estimate how long the bullying has gone on. However, other people may find it difficult to identify exactly when the bullying started, so we cannot be certain of the validity of these reports. It is probably not difficult to gain agreement that being bullied or persistently exposed to negative behaviour at work will have some impact on health. But there is a considerable distance between relatively mild negative health effects and John's condition described in the previous paragraph. The type of report given by John pervades studies of bullying at work (UNISON 1997; Savva and Alexandrou 1998; Liefooghe and Olafsson 1999) and John is far from alone in the extreme terms he uses, requiring us to search for an explanation. For a number of years it has been well known that exposure to an extreme event, such as involvement in an accident or disaster, can result in severe long-term health impairment. In the medical literature this type of reaction (which manifests physical as well as psychological symptoms) has been given the name Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The medical diagnosis of PTSD is linked to symptoms such as vivid re-living of the event or frequent flashbacks and a tendency to avoid any stimuli linked to or associated with the traumatic event. Another common symptom observed in many sufferers of PTSD is a persistent feeling of irritability which tends to be sustained over very long periods (Scott and Stradling 1994). Until recently, PTSD was seen to be linked exclusively to single extreme traumatic events. However, from the mid-1990s researchers of workplace bullying in Scandinavia saw a similarity in the symptoms of those who had suffered severe forms of bullying at work with those identified as having PTSD. For example, some victims reported how they started sweating and even felt physically sick on seeing their workplace and this bears a close resemblance to a common symptom of PTSD. Based on work at a Swedish rehabilitation clinic for victims of workplace bullying, Leymann concluded that a large majority of victims qualified for the PTSD diagnosis (Leymann 1996). He also noted that many of his clients had undergone what he referred to as 'characterological change'. In other words, their personality and character had been distorted as a consequence of their experience. As a result, the person was not the same person that they had been prior to the series of traumatic bullying events. This idea that PTSD may be brought on by long-term exposure to small traumatic events, and not just as a result of a single traumatic incidence, reflected British research at the same time. Their focus was not on bullying as such, but on the effects of persistent long-term exposure to work-related stress (Scott and Stradling 1994). They preferred to use the term Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder (PDSD) to be able to distinguish this long-term (drip, drip) experience from the acute traumatic experience identified with PTSD (Scott and Stradling 1994). Interestingly, they also came to the conclusion that people experiencing severe prolonged stress may undergo a personality change. To explain the experience of people who have a severe degree of reaction to workplace bullying, we will refer extensively to a report on the long-term effects of bullying produced recently by Norwegian researchers (Einarsen et al. 1999). In their attempt to explain these health problems, they apply a model of traumatic life events introduced by Janoff-Bulman (1992). According to Janoff-Bulman, an event becomes disturbing when it challenges the following three fundamental suppositions we hold of the world: (1) the world as benevolent, (2) the world as meaningful and, (3) the self as worthy. Janoff-Bulman postulates that every human from childhood gradually puts together their view of the world, and that in most cases this picture is positive. Having our world-picture confirmed tends to provide us with a sense of security. Certainly, occasionally we realise that our picture is somewhat out of touch with the world and, therefore in need of some adjustment. On the contrary, traumatic events provide situations which challenge our basic assumptions of the world to the extent that our most strongly held beliefs of the world collapse. In other words, our well-established world-picture is no longer valid. How does this model apply to bullying at work From believing that most people at work wish you well (the word 'benevolent'), targets of bullying find themselves in a situation where they feel that somebody may be out to 'get them'. This feeling of being 'hounded' may be accompanied by feeling let down by their colleagues and friends. For most people, such an apparent lack of support in times of great need is extremely painful. In such situations, victims may seek meaning by asking themselves the question 'Why did this happen to me' (The word 'meaningful'). Individuals may now come to the conclusion that the world which they previously saw as positive now turns out to be neither fair nor meaningful. Victims who have invested greatly in their work and given a lot to the organisation find it hard to conclude that the world is anything but meaningful in the sense that they used to think of it. It would be understandable if targets of bullying stayed away from work as a result of health problems or as a way of severing contact with the workplace and the 'bullies'. However, only a few bullying studies have been able to find a link between exposure to abusive and bullying behaviour and increased sickness absenteeism, and in all cases the relationship was weak (e.g. Price Spratlen 1995). In the 1997 UNISON study, less than a third of those who had been bullied said that they had taken time off on account of bullying, and most of those only took a few days. The explanation given was that targets were too worried about their job to take time off (Rayner 1998). The recent UMIST study extended the enquiry regarding time off to the witnesses and the previously bullied. A weak, but significant, correlation was found between absenteeism and the four groups of people in the study who differed in their experience of bullying. People who were 'currently bullied' had the highest number of days off followed by those who were 'bullied in the past' and 'witnessing bullying only'. Respondents who had been neither bullied nor observed any bullying taking place within the last five years had taken the fewest days off. On average, respondents who were at present bullied had taken off three and a half days more in the last six months than those who were neither frightened nor had seen bullying. Leadership and conflict behaviour studies both appear to be converging on the need for the investigation of multiple parameters in parallel in an attempt to shed light on the complexity that is closer to real behaviour in the workplace. We will not get very far by looking for single types of behaviour that fit nicely into academic categories-as was shown when we examined the management literature. This type of evidence forces us to bring our academic studies closer to real life. It also shows the difficulty we will have in determining what constitutes a typical 'bully' and allocating their behaviour into neat categories. In recent years the staff meetings have stopped being exchanges of views but just reading out of decisions already made. And any attempt to raise any points whatsoever were just completely ignored or swept away. And that, in addition to the fact that people were constantly being ridiculed when absent, had the effect that people stopped putting themselves in an embarrassing position of being publicly ignored. It wasn't so much overt ridicule, but covert. Equally we must be concerned that we do not turn our managers into bullies by providing inadequate training or support as they tackle their ever-changing working environment. Our managers are not super-human, and if it is a societal norm that managers are expected to be so, then we need to do some serious thinking. What pervades all of our comments on this area is our treatment of non-achievement. Taking this point further, some commentary (e.g. Hoel and Cooper 2001) raises a question regarding the place of bullying within industrial relations dynamics. The authors note that in some American management literature, workers have been referred to as 'dysfunctional' and seen as 'misbehaving' when they have employed tactics to resist managerial control. In contrast, there are rarely any negative labels attached to managers engaged in workplace conflict. According to Hoel and Cooper (2001), these views may contribute to legitimising bullying in the workplace, so that such management literature reflects a further 'institutionalisation' of bullying within our society. People often seek to assign blame in workplace bullying situations. Many people will have opinions, and the authors' experience is that people are quite happy to voice their judgements. Sometimes the process of dealing with the blame is as hard as dealing with the bullying incident itself. There are lines of responsibility that can usefully be used to protect ourselves against blame. We can all take responsibility for checking that we are not bullying others by being open to feedback, acknowledging mistakes and amending our behaviour accordingly. Individuals who are involved professionally will need to be clear on where their responsibilities lie. Targets should tell someone, but we would not see targets as responsible for solving the situation in which they have found themselves. Instead, we would encourage targets to talk to others so that they can get assistance with solving the situation. Our principal duty of care is to ourselves, and where no help is at hand, employees may think that leaving the organisation is the only solution. The solution is to evolve a discreet but effective informal system of handling such information. Here, the 'duty of care' can act as a helpful vehicle (as it was meant to) by placing a burden on those who hear about negative actions to make their knowledge known to others. The law is a good reason to raise and resolve situations through ordinary good management. We should emphasise that such informal systems need a light touch; otherwise they can exacerbate the bullying in the way feared by the targets-by providing irritation to the bully and escalating the conflict further. Although the complaint may emerge from contact schemes (safety advisers, trade union representatives or occupational health advisers) probably the line managers will be at the centre of dealing with such informal complaints. Ideally all staff needs to be able to raise the issue with the alleged perpetrators in a way that is low-key, allows them to put their side of the case, but coaches them to amend their behaviour so that they do not cause distress. Here, investment in management training is worthwhile, as resolution may require a level of psychological tight-rope walking at times together with commensurate social skills on the part of the managers seeking resolution. Personnel or HR staff may find themselves providing coaching to those managers who are at the front line of informal systems and this would be time well spent. Some of these informal systems that involve gentle intervention might be seen as mediation. In some cases this will be true, and some organisations have tried to set up specific mediation services where a trained group of mediators can be brought into any situation by anyone who thinks that their services could be of use. Such services are being experimented with in workplace bullying, but the results are not clear yet. Unfortunately, when mediators are brought in, they often find that the situation has already escalated to such an extent that it is irretrievable, and their skills remain unused. References Archer, D. (1999) 'Exploring "bullying" culture in the para-military organisation', International Journal of Manpower 20(1/2):94-105. Ashforth, B. (1994) 'Petty tyranny in organizations', Human Relations 47: 755-78. Babiak, P. (1995) 'When psychopaths go to work: a case study of an industrial psychopath', Applied Psychology-An International Review 44(2):171-88. Cowie, H., Jennifer, D., Neto, C., Angulo, J.C., Pereira, B., Del Barrio, C. and Ananiadou, K. (2000) 'Comparing the nature of workplace bullying in two European countries: Portugal and UK', paper presented at Transcending Boundaries Conference, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, 6-8 September 2000. Cox, T., Griffith, A. and Rial-Gonzalez, E. (2000) Research on Work-related Stress, Luxembourg: European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. Coyne, I., Seigne, E. and Randall, P. (2000) 'Predicting workplace victim status from personality', European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 9(3):335-49. Crawford, N. (1997) Unpublished keynote paper presented at the Bullying Conference, Staffordshire University, UK. Crawford, N. (1999) 'Conundrums and confusion in organisations: the etymology of the work "bully"', International Journal of Manpower, 20(1/2):86-93. Daily Mail (2000) 'Psychopaths among us' by Christopher Matthew, p. 63. Davenport, N.Z., Distler Schwartz, R. and Pursell Elliott, G. (1999) Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the Workplace, Ames, Iowa: Civil Society Publishing. Hoel, H. (1997) 'Bullying at work: a Scandinavian perspective', Institution of Occupational Safety and Health Journal 1:51-9. Hoel, H. and Cooper, C.L. (2000a) 'Working with victims of workplace bullying', in H. Kemshall and J. Pritchard (eds) Good Practice in Working with Victims of Violence, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, pp. 101-18. Hoel, H., Cooper, C.L. and Faragher, B. (2000) 'Organisational implications of the experience of persistent aggressive behaviour and "bullying" in the workplace', paper presented at the Academy of Management Conference, Toronto, 5-8 August 2000. Hoel, H., Rayner, C. and Cooper, C.L. (1999) 'Workplace bullying', International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology 14: 189-230. Read More