Executive Coaching: Handling Workplace Bully Culture

Despite what we have learned over the past two decades, workplace bullying remains a key problem for leaders and managers. The experts, academics, management consultants, and industrial psychologists report an increase in bullying. And it’s not limited by demographics, tax brackets, or titles: bullying is increasing in cubicles, manufacturing plants, and even executive suites. Executive coaching can help senior leaders how to handle and eliminate workplace bullies.

According to a 2017 National Survey, 61% of Americans are aware of abusive conduct in the workplace. This includes 19% of Americans who are bullied and another 19% who witness it, totaling an estimated 60.4 million Americans. Examples of bullying are much more apparent via news outlets, social media, and the like.

The costs are staggering for organizations and individuals. Some estimates exceed $150,000/bully/year. Employers and insurers spend $250 billion annually on direct employee healthcare expenses, turnover and retraining expenses, accidents related to stress-induced fatigue, litigation and settlements, and resistance to top-down change initiatives.

Traditionally, experts recommend that those bullied document the events, calculate the costs, and present these to the employer with a request to remove the bully. Unfortunately, the reported success rate for this approach is only 22.3%. Prevention is the best approach for individuals and organizations: protect employees with policies that enforce zero tolerance for workplace bullying and model the behavior.

Recognize Bullying, Harassment, and Aggression

In today’s culture, workplace bullying is defined as unwelcome behavior that occurs over a period of time and is meant to harm someone who feels powerless to respond.

According to the official website of the U.S. government, stopbullying.gov:

“Bullying is unwanted, aggressive behavior…that involves a real or perceived power imbalance. The behavior is repeated or has the potential to be repeated over time. Many employees believe management can enable bullying, which can be corrected from the top down with executive coaching.

To be considered bullying, the behavior must be aggressive and include:

▶ An Imbalance of Power: …such as physical strength, access to embarrassing information, or popularity—to control or harm others. Power imbalances can change over time and in different situations, even involving the same people.

▶ Repetition: Bullying behaviors happen more than once or have the potential to happen more than once.

Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose.”

Generally speaking, bullying in the workplace goes largely unrecognized by employers, but great leaders and managers watch and listen for the signs:

▶ Changes in employee behavior (withdrawn, absent, agitated, frustrated)

▶ Individual pitting or competition

▶ Blaming or taking undeserved credit

▶ Gossip, mockery, jokes, or other forms of humiliation

▶ Cliques, alliances, or teams that are not inclusive and supportive lead to shifts or redistribution of responsibilities, tasks, or assignments

▶ Spying, interfering, obstructing, poaching, undermining, or sabotaging

Aggression may involve a single incident, while bullying involves repetition and patterns of behavior. It is often subtle and hard to put one’s finger on. The bottom line is that workplace bullies undermine an individual’s right to dignity at work.

Understand Bullying, Harassment, and Aggression Risks

While workplace bullies are likely to target peers, bullying crosses all levels of organizations, from the top down and from the bottom up. A 2019 Study suggests that stressful situations increase the risk of exposure to workplace bullying.

According to the recent study, A Risk Factor for Exposure to Workplace Bullying,

“Employees reporting a higher degree of imbalance between efforts and rewards (i.e. who are under-rewarded in comparison to their efforts) have a higher likelihood to be a target of bullying. The perceived injustice may lead employees to engage in norm-breaking behavior and also signal low social standing to others, thereby potentially eliciting negative behaviors from others.”

Other bullying, harassment, and aggression risk factors include:

▶ Major organizational changes (mergers, restructuring, new technology, or re-tooling)

▶ Staff/resource shortages

▶ Poor communication (silos, fragmentation, and one-way communication)

▶ Lack of policies

▶ Interpersonal conflicts

▶ Increased goals/demands

Left unchecked, bullying can become a status quo for an organization, creating a bully culture and a spiral of abuse.

Bully Culture

A bully culture is created when bullying becomes accepted as part of the workplace culture. According to author Tim Field founder of bullyonline.org, there are several different types of workplace bullies and distinctions between corporate, organizational, and institutional bullying:

Organizational bullying: when an organization struggles to adapt to changing markets, reduced income, budget cuts, imposed expectations, and other external pressures. [short-term occurrences]

Corporate bullying: when an employer abuses employees with impunity, especially when the law is weak and jobs are scarce. Examples include coercing employees, unfair dismissal, denial of benefits, spying/monitoring, creating competition between employees, encouraging fabrication of colleague complaints, etc.

Institutional bullying occurs when bullying becomes entrenched and accepted as part of the culture. Examples include people being moved, permanent roles being replaced by short-term contracts on less favorable terms with little alternative but to accept, increasing workloads, changing schedules, changing roles, blocking or terminating career progression paths, etc., all without consultation.

Bullying Threat Assessment

Violence in the workplace is not uncommon: in 2017, assaults resulted in 18,400 injuries and 458 fatalities, according to the National Safety Council. While healthcare workers, service providers, and education workers report more violence than other industries, it can happen anywhere. Training to recognize signs of workplace bullying can help. Many industries have also adopted a threat assessment process to prevent violence. The American National Standards Institute endorsed using such teams in colleges in 2010 and workplaces in 2011.

Bullying Threat Assessment Process

The threat assessment process involves three functions: identify, assess, and manage. Threat assessment is different from the more established practice of violence-risk assessment, which attempts to predict an individual’s capacity to generally react to situations violently. Instead, threat assessment aims to interrupt people on a pathway to commit violence.

Forensic clinical psychologist Dewey Cornell, Ph.D., describes threat assessment for American Psychological Association in public health terms: prevention, not prediction:

“Just as seatbelts and speed limits prevent injuries without predicting who will crash a car, and restrictions on cigarette sales reduce lung cancer deaths without pinpointing who will get the disease, threat assessments aim to prevent violence without profiling potential attackers. We don’t intervene because we predict someone is dangerous, we want to intervene because they’re troubled or there’s conflict or people are worried about them. Prevention becomes a bonus or a secondary gain from dealing with the underlying issue.”

How threat assessment works:

Identify. Authorities identify threats. To do that, people must know when, how, and where to report concerns.

Assess. Gather and evaluate information from multiple sources to better understand if the person is planning violence. That could involve security professionals, supervisors, or human resources managers talking to the person of concern, his or her peers and supervisors, and looking to social media sites. Authorities may also analyze the subject’s current situation. They ask: Has the subject recently lost a job, gone through a divorce, or filed for bankruptcy? How has he or she handled adversity in the past? Investigators ascertain whether or not the person of concern has a motive, a target, and the organizational skills to carry out an attack. Can he or she get a weapon and use it?

Manage. More often than not, an assessment reveals a manageable underlying issue, such as bullying, anxiety, or depression, that mental health professionals are well-trained to handle.

According to Cornell,

“We found in case after case, with a systematic, careful approach focused on the problem that stimulated the threat, the threat can go away and the concern about violence diminishes. Every threat is really a symptom of a problem that someone can’t resolve.”

Leaders and managers must recognize the signs of workplace bullying and address issues before violence erupts.

Correct a Bully Problem

Psychologists have typically looked at violence from an individual perspective, such as who might be likely to commit violent acts. However, they need to dispel the myths and identify the organizational factors that may lead someone to bully in the workplace.

Dispel the Bullying Myths

▶ Not at my work

▶ It’s a fact of life (and we can’t stop it)

The truth is that 80% of people studied in 2016 had experienced cyberbullying in the workplace, according to the University of Sheffield and Nottingham University. However, there are things that individuals and organizations can do to correct the bullying problem. The system, or the organization, is responsible for a psychologically healthy environment.

Correct a bully problem by addressing organizational issues:

▶ Train employees on how to respond to bullying and communicate with difficult people, as well as other interpersonal training programs.

▶ Examine your corporate culture. Check with the human resources department for complaints of unfair treatment, stress, and disability claims. Look for patterns within a department.

▶ Evaluate your anti-bullying policies, procedures, and processes. Ensure an effective and supportive system for reporting difficult interpersonal issues.

▶ Provide adequate coaching or counseling for victims and offenders. One of the most crucial aspects of creating a healthy workplace is what a company does when it finds a problem employee or manager. The instigator should be made aware that the behavior is inappropriate and not given further responsibility over others. To do so would be to institutionalize the inappropriate behavior.

▶ Set clear examples and limits about appropriate behavior at work. Positively enforce standards and policies early on.

▶ Mitigate stress. Certainly, managers do not have control over all the variables that may trigger stress and negativity, but when people perceive a fair workplace, they don’t act out. Provide a sense of employment security, a feeling that it is possible to move within the organization as change occurs. Employees also feel they are trusted, respected, treated with dignity, and given some control over their jobs.

Practicing respect in the workplace and eliminating bullying changes the whole company. Production and efficiency go up, morale improves, and profits soar. Research indicates that even psychologically unhealthy people are much less likely to engage in violence in a healthy work organization.

Prevent Workplace Bullies

There is no federal anti-bullying legislation in the United States. However, 30 states have introduced workplace anti-bullying bills in recent years, and businesses in California are required to train supervisors on how to identify abusive conduct. But even without federal or state law protection¹, bullying can be prevented and prohibited with employer policies and practices.

Don Philpott, a former senior correspondent for Reuters and editor of the International Homeland Security Journal, suggests a five-step process for understanding and preventing workplace violence in The Workplace Violence Prevention Handbook (Bernan Press, 2019).

This approach can also be used to prevent workplace bullies from causing further harm to individuals and organizations:

▶ Understand

▶ Detect

▶ Defuse and protect

▶ Assess and contain

▶ Prevent

Anti-bully Policies and Practices

What are your anti-bullying policies and practices? How do they prevent bullying? Ensure an effective and supportive system is in place for reporting difficult interpersonal issues.

Attorney Jessica Westerman suggests that employers:

▶ Create an inclusive culture: prioritize inclusivity.

▶ Survey all employees (anonymously) to identify problems.

▶ Tailor policies and procedures in response to survey findings.

▶ Establish clear anti-bullying policies and communicate via writing in all languages used in the organization.

▶ Conduct workplace civility training to promote respect for all.

▶ Conduct bystander intervention training to empower co-workers to intervene and create a sense of collective responsibility.

▶ Establish and implement clear and simple procedures to report incidents and maintain employee confidentiality.

The key to preventing workplace bullying is the knowledge and belief that such incidents can be promptly reported, heard, and investigated and that workplace bullies will be held accountable. Therefore, leaders must create and adopt policies and codes of conduct that address respect in the workplace and bullying.

1. Bullying is actionable under federal law when its basis is tied to a protected category, such as color, national origin, race, religion, sex, age, disability, and genetic information. If bullying amounts to some other civil or criminal wrong, such as assault or battery, it could amount to a claim under state law.