Bully at Work

Interview with Tim Field

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=25022002-100833-5315r

In 1994 Tim Field was bullied out of his job as a Customer Services
Manager which resulted in a stress breakdown. Turning his experience
to good use he set up the UK National Workplace Bullying Advice Line
in 1996 and his web site Bully Online in 1997 since which time he
has worked on over 5000 cases worldwide. He now lectures widely as
well as writing and publishing books on bullying and psychiatric
injury. He holds two honorary doctorates for his work on identifying
and dealing with bullying. He is the Webmaster of Bully Online:

http://www.successunlimited.co.uk/

http://www.bullyonline.org/

http://www.thefieldfoundation.org/

Q: What is workplace bullying?

A: Workplace bullying is persistent, unwelcome, intrusive behaviour
of one or more individuals whose actions prevent others from
fulfilling their duties.

Q: How is it different to adopting disciplinarian measures,
maintaining strict supervision, or oversight?

A: The purpose of bullying is to hide the inadequacy of the bully
and has nothing to do with "management" or the achievement of tasks.
Bullies project their inadequacies onto others to distract and
divert attention away from the inadequacies. In most cases of
workplace bullying reported to the UK National Workplace Bullying
Advice Line, the bully is a serial bully who has a history of
conflict with staff. The bullying that one sees is often also the
tip of an iceberg of wrongdoing which may include misappropriation
of budgets, harassment, discrimination, as well as breaches of
rules, regulations, professional codes of conduct and health and
safety practices.

Q: Should it be distinguished from harassment (including sexual
harassment), or stalking?

A: Bullying is, I believe, the underlying behavior and thus the
common denominator of harassment, discrimination, stalking and
abuse. What varies is the focus for expression of the behavior. For
instance, a harasser or discriminator focuses on race or gender or
disability.

Bullies focus on competence and popularity which at present are not
covered by employment legislation.

Bullies seethe with resentment and anger and the conduits for
release of this inner anger are jealousy and envy which explains why
bullies pick on employees who are good at their job and popular with
people. Being emotionally immature, bullies crave attention and
become resentful when others get more attention for their competence
and achievements than themselves.

Q: What is the profile of the typical bully?

A: Over 90% of the cases reported to the UK National Workplace
Bullying Advice Line involve a serial bully who can be recognised by
their behaviour profile which includes compulsive lying, a Jekyll
and Hyde nature, an unusually high verbal facility, charm and a
considerable capacity to deceive, an arrested level of emotional
development, and a compulsive need to control. The serial bully
rarely commits a physical assault or an arrestable offence,
preferring instead to remain within the realms of psychological
violence and non-arrestable offences.

Q: What are bullying's typical outcomes?

A: In the majority of cases, the target of bullying is eliminated
through forced resignation, unfair dismissal, or early or ill-
health retirement whilst the bully is promoted. After a short
interval of between 2-14 days, the bully selects another target and
the cycle restarts. Sometimes another target is selected before the
current target is eliminated.

Q: Can you provide us with some statistics? How often does bullying
occur? How many people are affected?

A: Surveys of bullying in the UK indicate that between 12-50% of the
workforce experience bullying. Statistics from the UK National
Workplace Bullying Advice Line reveal that around 20% of cases are
from the education sector, 12% are from healthcare, 10% are from
social services, and around 6% from the voluntary / charity / not-
for-profit sector.

After that, calls come from all sectors both public and private,
with finance, media, police, postal workers and other government
employees featuring prominently. Enquiries from outside the UK
(notably USA, Canada, Australia and Ireland) show similar patterns
with the caring professions topping the list of bullied workers.

Q: Could you estimate the economic effects of workplace bullying -
costs to employers (firms), employees, law enforcement agencies, the
courts, the government, etc.?

A: Bullying is one of the major causes of stress, and the cost of
stress to UK plc is thought to be between £5-12 billion (US$7-17
billion). When all the direct, indirect and consequential costs of
bullying are taken into account, the cost to UK plc (taxpayers and
shareholders) could be in excess of £30 billion (US$44 billion),
equivalent to around £1,000 hidden tax per working adult per year.
Employers do not account for the cost of bullying and its
consequences, therefore the figures never appear on balance sheets.

Employees have to work twice as hard to overcome the serial bully's
inefficiency and dysfunction which can spread through an
organisation like a cancer.

Because of its subtle nature, bullying can be difficult to
recognise, but the consequences are easy to spot: excessive
workloads, lack of support, a climate of fear, and high levels of
insecurity.

The effects on health include, amongst other things, chronic
fatigue, damage to the immune system, reactive depression, and
suicide.

The indirect costs of bullying include higher-than average staff
turnover and sickness absence. Each of these incur consequential
costs of staff cover, administration, loss of production and reduced
productivity which are rarely recognised and even more rarely
attributed to their cause. Absenteeism alone costs UK plc over £10
billion a year and stress is now officially the number one cause of
sickness absence having taken over from the common cold. However,
surveys suggest that at least 20% of employers still do not regard
stress as a health and safety issue, instead preferring to see it as
skiving and malingering.

The Bristol Stress and Health at Work Study published by the HSE in
June

2000 revealed that 1 in 5 UK workers (around 5.5m) reported feeling
extremely stressed at work. The main stress factors were having too
much work and not being supported by managers. In November 2001 a
study by Proudfoot Consulting revealed the cost of bad management,
low employee morale and poorly-trained staff to British business at
117 lost working days a year. At 65%, bad management (often a
euphemism for bullying) accounted for the biggest slice of
unproductive days with low morale accounting for 17%. The study also
suggested that in the UK 52% of all working time is spent
unproductively compared to the European average of 43%.

The results of a three-year survey of British workers by the Gallup
Organization published in October 2001 revealed that many employers
are not getting the best from their employees. The most common
response to questions such as "how engaged are your employees?"
and "how effective is your leadership and management style?"
and "how well are you capitalising on the talents, skills and
knowledge of your people?" was an overwhelming "not very much". The
survey also found that the longer an employee stayed, the less
engaged they became. The cost to UK plc of lost work days due to
lack of engagement was estimated to be between £39-48 billion a year.

Q: What can be done to reduce workplace bullying? Are firms, the
government, law enforcement agencies, the courts - aware of the
problem and its magnitude? Are educational campaign effective? Did
anti-bullying laws prove effective?

A: Most bullying is hierarchical and can be traced to the top or
near the top. As bullying is often the visible tip of an iceberg of
wrongdoing, denial is the most common strategy employed by toxic
managements. Only Sweden has a law which specifically addresses
bullying. Where no law exists, bullies feel free to bully. Whilst
the law is not a solution, the presence of a law is an indication
that society has made a judgement that the behaviour is no longer
acceptable.

Awareness of bullying, and especially its seriousness, is still low
throughout society. Bullying is not just "something children do in
the playground", it's a lifetime behaviour on the same level as
domestic violence, sexual harassment, and rape.

Bullying is a form of psychological and emotional rape because of
its intrusive and violational nature.