Mobbing at Work, Academic Mobbing, Bullying in the Military (Mobbing is happening in my company / team)

Most companies today are learning the value of a harmonious workplace environment. The following is intended for managers or other decision makers that want to be pro-active in the prevention of unethical workplace behavior.

One way to put an end to all ongoing or potential mobbing practices in future is to organize a company training day. This event should be organized for the purpose of teaching employees and managers alike about what mobbing is, how it looks like, what it does to the individual and to the company, and what legal ramifications your company has implemented, in order to deal with mobbing. 

These training events are usually conducted by outside groups that can be businesses or NGOs that specialize in these types of training programs. Find out which groups exist in your locality and invite them for a chat in your company. They might also offer assessing services to companies about whether the environment is conductive to mobbing or not. 

If you want to take precautions to prevent workplace mobbing in your company, but are not sure how to deal with mobbing at work or if mobbing is an already existing practice in your organization, the following pointers might help you get a clearer picture of your work environment:

1. Identify factors at work that may cause high stress, or other factors that make bullying more likely to occur
2. Conduct a survey among your employees on the issue of workplace mobbing and bullying. See what they find a "normal" and "acceptable" behavior.
3. Monitor absenteeism, sick leave, staff turnover, grievances, injury reports, and other sudden behavior changes among your staff. This may be an indication of bullying.
4. Monitor relationship quality between clients, staff and management. If poor or tense, your company environment may be conductive to mobbing.

Many companies that care about their employees and their reputation find that preventive actions are the best forms of protection against unwanted behavior in the workplace. For this purpose your company might consider developing a company mobbing policy that should be provided to all employees and/or can be printed and framed in a visible place.

Here is what a sample mobbing policy looks like. Note that this is only a sample, your mobbing policy may look quite differently that this one.

If you are a manager that needs to make that assessment for one of your subordinates on whether they are being bullied, mobbed or harassed, please go through the checklist below to determine whether the person blamed is engaged in workplace mobbing, bullying or harassment.

1. The person communicates in inappropriate ways (yelling, screaming, using profanity, and issuing threats);
2. Gives workload and deadlines that are totally unreasonable and beyond what can be normally achieved;
3. Constantly belittles others, often insults employees;
4. Engaged in finding faults in performance and making them an inappropriately huge issue;
5. Blames others for every fault or problem in the office/workplace/company. Expert at assigning blame;
6. Engages in personal criticism often;
7. Diminishing and not recognizing others achievements; stealing others accomplishments;
8. Engages in spreading rumors to belittle others, often to undermine them personally and/or professionally, and to alienate them from the rest of the co-workers;
9. Intimidates others and threatens their job, promotion, bonus, etc.;
10. Often changes company targets and goals, then lies about them existing in the first place;

If you have answered positively to 1-3 of these questions, this is no reason to worry. You might want to have a word with the person about this, though.

If you have answered positively to 4-6 of these questions, you may have bullying and mobbing in your company. Time to look deeper into who is doing what and why, and definitely deal with this person, at least informally.

If you have answered positively to more than 6 of these questions, you definitely have a major issue in your company. Time to take immediate actions!

A bully can foster negative feelings among people, negative workplace energy and general dysfunction in the workplace. Bullies often form something similar to a pack of wolves, in which he or she is the alpha leader, due to lack of self-confidence.

One of the fastest way to save your company and deal with mobbing at workplace is to identify and deal directly with the alpha leader. Hold this person accountable for the negative atmosphere created in the workplace and DO NOT be lenient. 

Although this may make you less popular among his "pack", in the long run this can save the company.

Some companies have a culture where "butt-kissing", "finger-pointing", bullying and mobbing are accepted ways to go about the day. However, there are many negative side effects that this company culture has on the business and organization itself. Here are some:

1. Stress and high blood pressure - employees and managers are often under stress. Stress creates a bad vibe in the office. It also kills creativity, or creative problem solving, independent thinking, initiative and other driving forces of any good business. Not to mention that stressed out employees often have more sick-leave days. Stress can cause high blood pressure, due to which the employee is at a serious risk of various cardiovascular diseases. 
   
   
2. Absenteeism and low productivity - mobbing and other forms of harassment are used by some companies because they believe that cracking the whip increases productivity. When employees are verbally abused, emotionally stressed out and shattered, they do have a tendency to avoid going to work. Absenteeism can be in some cases a measure of mobbing in the company. And regarding productivity, whiping people into shape is a strategy from the past. Nowadays, people do expect to be respected, honored and appreciated as human beings first, and as employees, too. An abused person will never be as productive worker as the person that is valued and appreciated. 
   
   
3. Low self-esteem and increased cases of depression - employees that are bullied and harassed lose their self-esteem. This doesn't happen over night. It is usually a slow, barely perceptible process that eats away at the confidence of the employee until he is a shell of his former self. And when employees lose their self-esteem, every aspect of the work process can suffer and go downhill. In some more extreme cases, and based also on the personality type of the employee. Low self-esteem can turn into short or long-term depression. Depressed employees are often not even aware that they are depressed, but their enthusiasm and general energy level reveals that they would rather be somewhere else.
   
   
4. Anxiety and digestive problems - bullying and harassment can make even the most loyal and strong of employees full of fear, dread and anxiety at the workplace. This is when mistakes are made, the obvious is not seen or is missed, things get forgotten and more. Generally speaking, anxiety can make a mess out of every project or activity. On the other hand, high anxiety may lead to various health problems, out of which digestive issues are often pointed out.
   
   
5. Mobbing at work may cause a lot of troubles to an employee. Some people repress the problem at work, but when they relax at home, prior to going to bed, these worries and problems have the habit of surfacing and playing out over and over again. This may lead to insomnia. And if having workers that show up for work tired isn't enough, in time insomniacs may be also prone to stress and irritability.

The new schools of management are breaking the old paradigm of what a manager should be and behave like. If you want to be a manager that doesn't behave like a bully, that inspires without the mobbing and harassment, here is a short list describing the difference between managers and bullies:

1. The manager rarely needs to discipline his employees; the bully often issues reprimands and warnings;
2. The manager has integrity and a good moral code; the bully is amoral and has no integrity;
3. The manager leads with example and sets a good example; the bully doesn't lead. He intimidates and doesn't set any examples;
4. The manager is respected by many; the bully is loathed my most;
5. The manager trusts people and allows them room to do the job in their own style; the bully has to control everything and frequently interferes;
6. The manager listens to his employees and offers guidance; the bully doesn't listen and just barks out orders;
7. The manager has highly developed personal skills; the bully has poor social skills in general;
8. The manager values other people; the bully constantly devalues others;
9. The manager is respectful and considerate; the bully is disrespectful and inconsiderate;
10. The manager accepts responsibility; the bully blames others.

Bullying is often used to describe a repeated pattern of negative intrusive volitional behavior against one or more targets. It may represent constant trivial criticism, devaluing, discrediting, undermining and the inability to acknowledge a person. Bullying is usually initiated and exercised by one person, although others might join in later. 

Mobbing, on the other hand, is (by definition) performed by a group of people in a social setting which in this case is a workplace. This "pack" might be small or large(er) and they involve themselves in an adversarial conduct with their chosen target in order to undermine or harm the target in a visible or measurable way obvious to others.

In mobbing there is always a pack leader. If this person is extrovert he is easily obvious for he/she is the one leading the adversarial action and coercing others in the pack to join in. If the leader is an introvert he/she is more difficult to spot for he/she works in the background coercing and manipulating others to join in on the mobbing. 

Generally, the introvert pack leader is considered more dangerous than the extrovert.

Apologists of bullies often say that if things are really that bad, if you really are being mobbed, harassed and bullied, then you would simply leave the company. Or, in other words, not leaving the company means that things are not that bad. 

If you really want to know why some of your employees are not leaving despite rumors of mobbing, here is a short list of reasons why they may be doing so:

1. They need to pay the mortgage;
2. They have children at school or college they support;
3. They are the sole person employed in their household;
4. Being/Living alone and not having anyone to turn to for help, not even temporarily;
5. Caring for a disabled or dying partner, child, or relative;
6. Having integrity which doesn't allow you to back down when being right;
7. Going through a painful divorce or dealing with the aftermath of a divorce;
8. Having debts to pay off;
9. They believe that they are too old to start anew;
10. Being a specialist in your field with not many job opportunities at the moment;

Your employees might be bullied, mobbed and harassed even so no one is leaving the company. If you are suspecting mobbing in your company, take another closer look.

Some people tend to become a bully much stronger than others. Therefore it's important to identify such tendencies at the recruiting stage to prevent those people from joining your company and potential cases of mobbing at work.

The key question is of course - how can you identify those? 

Many psychologists are digging into the profile of a bully these days. The serial bully is particularly interesting to them because he/she can be found in your everyday company, lurking and doing damage without being noticed. Most psychologists believe that bullies, especially serial bullies share many common personality traits with psychopaths. In fact, they believe that people who bully, abuse and harass are all psychopaths. 

For the average person, the first problem to overcome in identifying a bully is that we all imagine them to be serial killers, rapists and cannibals, something like Hannibal Lector. This couldn't be further from the truth. Psychopaths are usually very clever and highly intelligent, they are usually well educated and appear to have only the best interest at heart for the group and the company. They come from every walk of life, working as doctors, politicians, lawyers, businessmen, managers, teachers, etc.

However, they are a very different creature on the inside. The psychopath seeks to dominate and control, he has no inborn guilt impulse, and  he/she continually breaks social norms, in order to get what he/she wants.

The psychopath is more like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in real life, with one difference: the evil part is the real face, while the normal face is the mask they project to society. Some studies show that female psychopaths are more dangerous in the workplace than their male counterparts. They can manipulate more easily than men, convince and persuade, especially male colleagues, to do what they want, while they hide in the background. 

There are some psychologists that are preparing tests for employers to identify (potential) psychopaths. However, these are not 100% accurate.

Not many people believe that workplace bullying, mobbing, harassment and abuse have any effect on the economic side of the organization itself. They are wrong. In fact, many organizations have realized that workplace bullying has a negative economic effect on the company. Tim Field, webmaster of BULLY ONLINE provides the following information for the UK, related to mobbing at work:

1. Bullying is the major cause of stress in the workplace. The cost to UK businesses is thought to be between 5-12 billion pounds. When all direct, indirect and consequential costs of bullying are taken into account this amount goes up to 30 billion pounds.
2. Employees have to work twice as hard to overcome the serial bully's inefficiency and dysfunction.
3. The indirect costs of bullying include higher-than-average staff turnover and sickness leave. Absenteeism costs UK plc more than $14 billion a year.
4. The Bristol Stress and Health Work Study published by the HSE in June 2000 revealed bad management account for the biggest slice of unproductive days with low morale accounting for 17%.
5. A 3-year survey of British workers by the Gallup Organization published in October 2001 revealed that the cost to UK plc of lost workdays due to lack of engagement was estimated to be between $56 billion - $70 billion a year.

Many human-resource managers have realized that workplace mobbing has a real impact on productivity, in the sense that it actually lowers it!

Psychologist Michael H. Harrison Ph.D. quoted a recent survey of 9.000 federal employees indicating that 42% of female and 15% of male employees reported being harassed within a two-year period, resulting in a cost of more than $180 million in lost time and productivity. He says: "This kind of harassment has a huge impact on a company's bottom line."

The major source of these high costs was employee absenteeism, as well as low morale, nurturing emotional wounds and other stress-related illnesses.

If you are a conscientious manager that wants to develop a healthy company that values its employees, their psychological welfare, as well as their professional performance, you might want to establish your own company support service for the victims of workplace mobbing, bullying, harassment and violence.

These support services can help the victim cope with the stress and lingering after-effects of the negative experience. They can help the employee regain their courage, self-appreciation, self-worth and self-esteem. They can aid the employee that has experienced lowered performance due to mobbing or if the employee can't relax anymore in the office and is constantly "on the edge". The people working in these support services are usually psychology majors.