July 1st, 2009
Bullying at Work Worsens for 5 Million Americans
Thanks if you were one of the 456 June WBI Survey respondents, 99% of whom were individuals who had been bullied or witnessed it. We asked if bullying began after Sept 2008, the time when the economic global crisis suddenly was recognized. Our intuitive guess was that tough times escalate bullying.
27.5% did say that the bullying worsened (it was more abusive, severe or frequent) after Sept. and 37% of respondents said that employers blamed financial troubles on the economic downturn. You can read the results of the brief survey here.
However, 75% of the bullying predated the crisis. In 22% of cases, bullying started on or after Sept. Since October to December is one quarter of the year, one would expect that about a quarter of the cases to begin during that calendar period.
The link between tough times and bullying hinges solely on the 28% worsening. Though we could not have definitively said tough times CAUSE more bullying if the 22% had been much higher, we would have been more confident about the potential link.
Explanations: Perhaps 9 months is not a sufficient time for the effect to be felt by more than 28% of targets OR there is no effect, no link there to discover OR it is sufficiently outrageous that a quarter of bullied targets experienced an increase in abuse at work.
If we combine this comparatively small study with the findings from our large national scientific survey (an academic no-no, but I’m a recovering academic now), we could say that bullying got worse for 4% of working Americans [from .275 x .126 (the currently bullied rate) = .0364]. That doesn’t sound like much but based on labor force statistics — that’s 5.3 million workers! [from .0364 x 147,000,000] 18.5 million workers are currently (or within 12 months) being bullied.
For over 5 million workers to experience even more misery for no reason other than the bad luck to have run into a conniving, intimidating, control freak is unconscionable.
That’s the outcome that makes the most sense from our WBI June 2009 Survey.
You can read the results of the brief survey here. To compare some of the findings to the true national picture, read the WBI-Zogby U.S. Survey.
Gary Namie
So much for statistics. Tell us your story about the increase in psychological violence in your workplace here. Add a comment.
Tags: bullying prevalence, economic crisis, recession, recession and bullying, research, survey, WBI-Zogby
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 8:13 am and is filed under Bullying Tutorials, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] The basis for claiming that the recession is exacerbating workplace bullying can be found in the WBI June 2009 study results. [...]
[...] Social psychologist Harvey Hornstein studied patterns and frequency of abusive supervision during the economic downturn of the 1990s and found that bullying activities intensify as times get tough. The Workplace Bullying Institute’s analysis of survey data on the impact of the current recession is consistent with this conclusion (http://www.workplacebullying.org/2009/07/01/2009-a-survey/). [...]