Bullies have always been a part of any group development, from the earliest civilizations, and in religions, militaries, schools, neighborhood cliques, teams, families, and companies.
The workplace bullying phenomenon, as we know it today, first entered the public consciousness on the heels of the workplace sexual harassment issue in the early 1980s. During that decade, Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann was among the first to conceptualize and analyze the act of workplace bullying. In the early 1990s, British journalist Andrea Adams popularized the term “workplace bullying” through a series of BBC radio documentaries.
In the United States, bullying first became a major issue in the public sector, with some schools and government agencies taking an avid interest in safeguarding against it. Later, this interest spilled over into private sector workplaces. During the early to mid-1990s, more American researchers began studying the problem of psychologically abusive behaviors at work and the harm they create. Another driver of interest in the private sector was the growing concern about the costs of workplace bullying to a company’s bottom line.
Today, workplace bullying incidents are four times more common in all U.S. organizations than sexual harassment episodes, and the related costs to businesses are also four times higher. In behavioral studies, bullying is now often closely linked to suicide and violence. The seriousness of the problem warrants that employers implement a sensible duty of care program in response.
Bullying is the use of force, threat, or coercion to abuse, intimidate, or aggressively dominate others. The behavior is often repeated and habitual. One essential prerequisite is the perception, by the bully or by others, of an imbalance of social or physical power, which distinguishes bullying from conflict. Behaviors used to assert such domination can include verbal harassment or threat, physical assault or coercion, and such acts may be directed repeatedly towards particular targets. Rationalizations of such behavior sometimes include differences of social class, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, behavior, body language, personality, reputation, lineage, strength, size, or ability. If bullying is done by a group, it is called mobbing.
Bullying can be defined in many different ways. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has no legal definition of bullying, while some states in the United States have laws against it. Bullying is divided into four basic types of abuse – emotional (sometimes called relational), verbal, physical, and cyber. It typically involves subtle methods of coercion, such as intimidation.
Bullying ranges from one-on-one, individual bullying through to group bullying called mobbing, in which the bully may have one or more “lieutenants” who may seem to be willing to assist the primary bully in his or her bullying activities. Bullying in school and the workplace is also referred to as peer abuse. Robert W. Fuller has analyzed bullying in the context of rankism.
A bullying culture can develop in any context in which humans interact with each other. This includes school, family, the workplace, home, and neighborhoods. The main platform for bullying is on social media websites. In a 2012 study of male adolescent American football players, “the strongest predictor [of bullying] was the perception of whether the most influential male in a player’s life would approve of the bullying behavior”.
STOP BULLYING 