Posts Tagged ‘workplace bullying definition’

Workplace bullying without consequences is not bullying

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

WBI introduced the British term “Workplace Bullying” to the U.S. back in 1997. We sometimes cringe when we see the bullying or bully terms tossed around glibly when people really mean to say “mean.” Bullying is so much more.

WBI defines workplace bullying as repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators that takes one or more of the following forms:

Verbal abuse
Offensive conduct/behaviors (including nonverbal) which are threatening, humiliating, or intimidating
Work interference — sabotage — which prevents work from getting done

The public may focus on the acts themselves, for example, verbal abuse. The most popular measure of bullying used by academic researchers is called the Negative Acts Questionnaire. Most consider verbal abuse unilaterally delivered to be sufficient to call the act bullying and the actor a bully. But we have a contrarian view.

We believe acts alone do not constitute bullying. Some recipients of what we all would agree was verbal abuse are not negatively affected. They genuinely are not offended, hurt or damaged in any way. Individual differences in sensitivity and socialization can account for the very real result.

Bullying requires both a committed act (actually acts done on a chronic basis) AND a negative effect on the recipient, the target. Neither act nor harm alone defines bullying. Without tangible impact, when there is no harm, there is no foul. Caveat: The onset of harm may be delayed as is PTSD. The absence of immediate harm followed by a latent effect is still harm. If no harm ever manifests itself, then we can say the person was not harmed and, therefore, not bullied.

Tangible harm comes in at least four varieties.

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