NO TIME FOR BULLIES

Workplace bullies cost time, money and the health of the bulllied

By Jim Lundstrom

Lynn used to work for a boss who took perverse pleasure in pissing her off.

“I used to come home crying,” said the Fox Valley woman (Lynn is not her real name. She asked to remain anonymous and that we not name her former boss or his company).

“It was the most unbearable thing,” she said. “He would call me names. He was awful, vicious. He was horrible. How I hung on, I don’t know.”

Lynn worked almost five years as administrative assistant for the small business owner who liked to needle her because she did not share his ultra-conservative views.

“He would always bring up politics to goad me. He knew my soft spots. He knew I would get upset,” she said. “He listened to the radio every day in his office and he adored Rush Limbaugh. I wasn’t familiar with Rush Limbaugh at all then. He would call me into the office and make me stand there and listen. He would get so riled. Quickly I realized I found it awful.”

Lynn finally put her foot down about the Limbaugh listening sessions, but the verbal abuse continued. Lynn was prepared to dutifully carry that cross.

When you need a job, it’s a lot more complicated than just saying ‘I quit’ and moving on,” she said. “When I did start to talk about these stories, some people said ‘Get out of there.’ But many people would say, ‘That’s just the way he is’ or ‘You have to toughen up. You need thicker skin. Let it bounce off.’ Well, maybe, but with these people, something has to be done. There is no doubt about it, it’s a form of abuse.”

The final straw for Lynn was seeing the boss bully a male co-worker by standing over him, screaming and questioning the man’s masculinity.

“It turned my stomach,” she said. “As I watched him scream at the top of his lungs at this very sweet, lovely man, I remember feeling a heat rising up in me, this shame and embarrassment. I should have just walked out, but soon after I was gone because I realized he was a mean man.”

* * *

Is bullying in the workplace really a problem?

A recent study claims one in 10 U.S. workers report feeling bullied at work and one in four say they work in hostile environments. A study of 9,000 federal workers found a widespread pattern of bullying over a two-year period that resulted in a cost of more than $180 million in lost time and productivity. Female workers in that group were the principal target (42% of the workforce), but men were targeted, too (15%).

While bullying in the workplace appears to know no cultural or political boundaries and can be found throughout the world, one leading researcher suggests American culture is predisposed to bullying and poor management is part of the problem.

“I think one of the biggest myths surrounding bullying that’s so powerful is this ongoing myth that bullying is an effective way of managing,” said Prof. Sarah Tracy of Arizona State University in Tempe. “Part of this connects up with our culture in the United States. We are used to getting our way in a lot of things, including politics, and the best way sometimes is to go around and wield our power. We are less aware of the long-term repercussions of that.”

Tracy is a former Neenah resident (1971-1989; her father, Boyd Tracy, still lives in Neenah) and Neenah High graduate who now serves as associate professor and director of the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication Initiative for Work, Life and Wellness at Arizona State University.

While workplace bullying is as old as humanity, Tracy says it has only recently become a subject of research in America.

“This whole area of study started with counselors in Scandinavian countries,” she said. “One in particular saw a number of patients who were coming in and talking about abuse in the workplace, really bad stuff. In the U.S. we’ve been more focused on demographic-based discrimination – sexual harassment, racial discrimination, age discrimination.

“My focus area of research has been stress and burnout and various emotion issues in organizations,” she said. “That kind of melded into this idea of emotional abuse. I had a PhD student I was working with who became particularly interested in the subject, Pamela Lutgin-Sandvik. She and I and a couple other people started doing more research on it, and one of the things we found, there just isn’t a lot of research out there on workplace bullying by that name.”

Bottom line watchers should know the costs of bullying in the workplace.

“Workplace bullying does cost – medical care, insurance, loss of productivity,” Tracy said. “We spoke with some women who were bullied and asked what they did after a bullying incident. Well, they would talk about the situation for hours and try to make sense of it. That’s time they’re not doing their work.”

Echoing the reaction that Lynn was getting from people when she told them about her bully boss, Tracy said one of the greatest problems faced by the bullied is being able to have their concerns heard and treated seriously.

“One of the issues we run up against as researchers, a lot of people think this is just kids stuff – ‘Oh, get a thicker skin. Really, are you that hurt by workplace bullying?’,” Tracy said.

Tracy, Lutgin-Sandvik and a third researcher, Jess K. Alberts, addressed the issue in a 2006 paper called Nightmares, Demons and Slaves: Exploring the Painful Metaphors
of Workplace Bullying (published in the Nov. 2006 Management Communication Quarterly; you can read it online at asu.edu/clas/communication/people/faculty/tracy/).

“What we do in this paper is demonstrate the emotional and material trauma that people face in terms of bullying,” Tracy said. “One of the things we talk about is the difficulty in dealing with it. One of the parallels I frequently make is to spousal abuse.

“Men especially don’t want to speak up. It’s a blow to self-identity, to self-efficacy. Just by admitting to abuse, people lower their credibility. It’s this paradox, how do I tell a story of abuse without damaging my credibility. If it’s really that bad, people are going to think I must be doing something to receive the abuse. It’s very tricky to know how to deal with it.”

Tracy and her colleagues have interviewed hundreds of victims of bullying.

“It’s worse than I thought it would be,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of immersion and interview research. I’ve hung out in prisons and jails and lived and worked on a cruise ship for a year. I didn’t know it would emotionally drain me so much. Hearing these stories were so painful. I would come out of the focus room and be spent over the amount of pain people have had, even years later. These people are in a state of tragedy.”

And while Tracy says the bullies themselves are the “black hole of workplace bullying research,” bully behavior is well known because, case to case, it is frighteningly similar, almost as if there’s a bully gene out there.

“Bullies in some ways are certain personalities,” she said. “They divide, isolate, put their target in the role of a child. Bullies are really good at managing up and keeping around them a circle of a few people in power that like them, and everybody else lives in fear of them. One of the things about bullying is isolating and dividing people, so it makes it pretty difficult for that isolated person to find a friend, and, oftentimes, similar to an abused child who sits there and watches her sibling get beat on. It’s this choice of do I want to speak up have a united front, but then I might get hit as well.”

Sometimes they are allowed to exist, and sometimes they are encouraged.

“There are very abusive corporate cultures and climates that encourage people to act in very competitive ways,” she said. “For a bully to be able to thrive, he or she has to be in an environment that encourages or condones their behavior, so there is a relationship with the context. We find some organizational contexts are much more conducive to bullying behavior. Hospitals are renowned for creating bullies. Doctors are among the worst.”

The existence of a corporate culture that condones bullying has been reflected in the bully victim surveys Tracy has conducted. A recurring theme from the bullied is that human resource departments are not viewed by victims as a safe haven and mediator.

“Many are very skeptical about human resources,” she said. “They don’t view human resources as being on their side.”

Tracy said she decided to let bullying victims draw their stories instead of telling them.

“We find that people in space of tragedy are sometimes better able to draw things than talk about them,” she said. “One woman drew a picture of herself and the bully fighting each other in a ring and the referee is human resources. The referee is also blindfolded. It’s perfect symbolism.”

Eventually, human resources departments are going to have to deal with the problem.

“Organizations don’t create rules or regulations until the time it is financially necessary for them to do so,” Tracy said. “Until such time people start winning lawsuits about workplace bullying, there are not going to be a lot of rules in place.”

She thinks the trend in workplace wellness may be a path to ending the reign of the workplace bully.

“With the proliferation of the understanding of workplace wellness and through the connect with insurance companies, the realization that there’s a whole slew of wellness programs that can actually save the business money, I think that’s the way the workplace bullying is going to mean something to organizations, when they realize how cost ineffective the behavior is and how costly it is to keep a bully employed.”

There have been workplace bullying lawsuits across the country, including two in Wisconsin that created a huge shift in the situations Don Finger and his fellow employee assistance specialists at Aspirus in Wausau were dealing with. Aspirus contracts with businesses throughout central and northern Wisconsin to provide employee assistance programs.

Finger said his office went from about 100 referrals a year, and most of those dealing with failed urine tests, to 250 referrals a year, many of those dealing with bullies.

“The shift started 11 years ago,” said Finger, a 17-year veteran who is known as Mr. EAP. “In the summer of 1997 there were two lawsuits that were settled in Wisconsin. In both cases, employees had gone to management and complained about the actions of another employee, but in both cases management told them to deal with it themselves. ‘We’re not running a babysitting service here. You need to work this out. Toughen up.’ They tried to work it out but they both ended up being harmed by the person they complained about. In both cases, they sued and there were settlements. Suddenly the word went out that there was something called liability.”

The news of these legal decisions quickly filtered down to businesses around the state, some of whom were probably well aware of bully problems before legal consequences were associated with the behavior.

“Before Sept. of ’97, we used to average about 100 referrals a year and almost all of those had to do with positive drug tests,” Finger said. “In Sept. ’97 alone we got 20 referrals in one month and not a single one of them had to do with positive drug tests. They had everything to do with companies finally catching on that they had to take this seriously. Our yearly average jumped from 100 to 260, 270 just like that.”

Finger has since developed a bully training seminar for supervisors and managers.

“I started bully training about two years ago and I’ve done it for a number of companies,” he said. “We had requests from companies that had episodes of bullying in the workplace.”

Finger said his biggest message to managers is to be truly aware of what is taking place at work.

“I talk about taking a proactive approach and take seriously anything that an employee brings to them. They must do an investigation,” he said. “That process is what caused many companies to come up with episodes of bullying.”

Supervisors who do conduct investigations after someone has reported a bully often find that other employees have been silent witnesses to the behavior for years.

“A supervisor who had been to my EAP training did an investigation by going to co-workers, who said, ‘We can’t believe it’s taken you all this time to come and check this out. It’s been going on for six years.’

“I preach that if you don’t take this seriously and begin to confront inappropriate behavior, you are just asking for something to happen. When you let them know that they can be personally liable, that can get the message across,” Finger said.

Once identified, can a workplace bully be reformed?

If sent to Finger and his colleagues, the bully undergoes an assessment to learn more about the root of the harassing, violent or bullying behavior. Then a return to work contract will be drawn up to set the conditions by which the bully must behave and how the company will accommodate his or her return to the workplace.

“In some cases the company says we need to have a fitness for duty assessment to determine whether this person can control the behavior,” Finger said. “We’ve had situations where we’ve had to say this person isn’t fit to work.”

“I think they can be reformed,” said Professor Tracy, but with the codicil that the bully will remain something of an enigma until more research is done on the perpetrators.

“It’s hard to put an ad out saying we want to survey workplace bullies,” she said.

But there might be hope for a bully who can learn to walk in another’s shoes.

“Empathy is something we learn from our parents and throughout our lives,” said Tracy. “But it’s something that can be learned as an adult as well. It’s hard to be a bully if you’re empathetic and you can see the world from somebody else’s point of view.”

Tired of being a victim?

Prof. Sarah Tracy said sometimes the best solution to workplace bullying is to quit, but don’t think of yourself as a quitter.

“I try to encourage people that they won’t be a quitter. They’ll be a survivor if they leave. It’s the smart person who gets out,” said the Arizona State University researcher.

But she also knows some things are easier said than done. Many can’t just up and quit working, and some people just are not constitutionally able to quit.

“For some people there’s a self-righteousness that they’re not going to quit, that it’s wrong and they’re going to beat this,” Tracy said. “And they’ll spend years of their lives trying to beat it.”

If you cannot or do not want to quit your job to get away from a bully, start documenting the bully’s behavior and present the documentation to supervisors and human resources.

“But this is assuming you are working in a place where you have another person to go to besides the bully,” Tracy said.

If you can bring co-workers onto your team, that avoids the he said/she said situation that the bully almost always wins, Tracy said.

She recommends checking out the Workplace Bullying Institute’s website at workplacebullying.org.

The institute was founded by Gary and Ruth Namie, who have also written a book called The Bully at Work: What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job.

“And there’s a really good book called The No Asshole Rule by Bob Sutton, a management professor at Stanford,” Tracy said. “He has a website, too, with a self-test, How to know you’re an asshole.” (You can find the test – ARSE, for Asshole Rating Self-Exam – at bsutton.typepad.com.)

Aspirus employee assistance specialist Don Finger recommends the bully book by the Namies, as well as You Don’t Have to Take It: A Woman’s Guide to Confronting Emotional Abuse at Work by Ginny NiCarthy, Adult Bullying by Peter Randall and When You Work for a Bully by Susan Futterman.

You can also use the power of research and publicity about it.

“I’ve heard of people punching out the articles and putting them on people’s desks,” Tracy said.