Is Your Employer A Bully?

Bullying is not a behavior that is restricted to the school yard.  It can also happen in the office by adults that should know better.  Workplace bullying includes tactics such as verbal, nonverbal, psychological, physical abuse and humiliation. It is described by experts as, “systematic aggressive communication, manipulation of work, and acts aimed at humiliating or degrading one or more individual that create an unhealthy and unprofessional power imbalance between bully and the victim.”

Workplace bullying may include: Threats to professional status, including belittling opinions, public professional humiliation, accusations regarding lack of effort, intimidating use of discipline or competence procedures Threat to personal standing, including undermining personal integrity, destructive innuendo and sarcasm, making inappropriate jokes about the victim, persistent teasing, name calling, insults, intimidation Isolation  including preventing access to opportunities, physical or social isolation, withholding necessary information.

Research by the Workplace Bullying Institute, suggests that the following are the most common  tactics used by workplace bullies: Falsely accusing someone of “errors” not actually made. Non-verbal intimidation, including glaring and staring.  The silent treatment to “ice out” and separate from other employees. Starting destructive rumors or gossip about the victim.

Workplace bullying overlaps to some degree with incivility but tends to be more intense and typically involves more repeated acts rudeness.  Increasing incivility between in the work environment can result in bullying, but isolated acts of incivility are not conceptually bullying despite the apparent similarity in their form and content. In case of bullying, the intent of harm is less ambiguous, an unequal balance of power is more salient, and the victim of bullying feels threatened, vulnerable and unable to defend himself or herself against negative recurring actions

Workplace bullying can create a very hostile and stressful work environment.  If you are being victimized by your employer who is creating a hostile work environment for you and making it impossible to work efficiently please give my office a call, The Law Office of Todd M. Friedman at (877) 449-8898