Have a problem co-worker? You're not alone
By Jaclyn Youhana
The Daily Journal Kankakee, IL
May 1, 2008
The manager got along with no one. He micromanaged. He nitpicked. He berated employees in front of their peers. "It was incredible," said Bob Bundus, of Kankakee, who at one point worked for said manager. "The guy would push you so bad. You'd get mad, and you didn't even want to do the job."
Bundus had little faith that the company's human resources department would do anything -- it never stood behind its employees, he said -- so he decided to handle the situation himself: He started to treat the manager just as badly as the manager treated other employees.
"That got him to shut up pretty much," Bundus said. "He could dish it, but he couldn't take it." The manager eventually moved to another position, and Bundus no longer had to deal with him.
In 2007 the Workplace Bullying Institute-Zogby International online poll -- the largest national scientific survey of workplace bullying in the United States -- found that more than 50 million people say they have been bullied at work. That's more than a third of Americans. When witnesses are included, half of all employees in the country have been involved in a bullying incident.
Not to imply that bullies are a new phenomenon to the workplace. Instead, instances are more likely to be reported today, said Steve Wilder, of Bradley's Sorenson Wilder & Associates, which handles safety and homeland security, often focusing on workplace violence.
Last month, the Indiana Supreme Court awarded nearly a third of a million dollars to Joseph E. Doescher, a former employee at St. Francis Hospital in Indianapolis. Doescher sued a St. Francis co-worker and heart surgeon, Daniel Raess, when Raess screamed at and verbally attacked Doescher before lunging at him and telling Doescher that his career was over, in 2001. [Details of the nation's first "bullying trial."]
What constitutes bullying?
Bullying occurs anytime one employee displays a form of domination and/or control over another, Wilder said. According to the Zogby poll, nearly three-quarters of bullies are bosses.
Wilder lists four primary kinds of bullying:
In instances of post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, the sufferer is more likely to retreat, not feel anger. Bullying is instead about control, said Gary Namie, the director of Workplace Bullying Institute. "(Bullies) are in control of their lives, and they're trying to control the lives of others," Namie said. "They're being proactively aggressive."
Fixing the problem
Anutza Bellissimo, who founded the Stress & Anger Management Institute in Hermosa Beach, Calif., is an anger management facilitator; companies send her their bullies so the employees can learn to be nicer.
Typically, Bellissimo said, bullying will occur for a long time before anything happens to correct the problem.
"I find I get a lot of referrals from very high IQ industries," Bellissimo said, "mainly engineers, people working in aerospace, people working in fields that are very technical. They don't have a lot of contact with a lot of people at one time, (and) maybe social skills are not highly developed."
It is human resources' duty to assure that instances of bullying are investigated, said Mary Jo Martyn, the president for the Kankakee chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management. The bullied employee can aid this process by documenting instances. However, the Zogby poll found that nearly two-thirds of employers tend to worsen cases of bullying by doing nothing.
Often, Wilder said, this is because human resources doesn't know where to turn when such problems arise. If such is the case, a bullied employee should then consider getting legal counsel for the problem, as bullying instances can fall under harassment laws, he said. In the past, such incidents rarely involved law officials, Wilder said, but "I think it's going to become more and more commonplace."
Though some human resources departments may not know how to handle workplace bullying, statistics show that it would likely behoove companies to respond; 45 percent of bullied employees suffer stress-related health problems, the Workplace Bullying Institute found. The range of complications includes hypertension, chronic fatigue syndrome and, in more than 80 percent of the cases, panic attacks. In 40 percent of the instances, the target person simply quits in an effort to restore his or her sanity and health, found the Zogby survey.
All of these related health problems cost the company in man-hours, Namie said.
"It makes good economic sense not to deny bullying," he said. "Bullies are too expensive to keep."
Did you know?
The United States is the last of the Western industrialized nations not to legally address workplace bullying, said Gary Namie, the director of the Workplace Bullying Institute, based in Washington state. Two provinces in Canada have anti-bullying laws. Nearly every European nation has them. South Africa has a code. States in Australia are picking them up, too.
Instead, employees have to rely on companies instituting their own anti-bullying policies -- which happens, but not often. Currently, 13 states have tried to introduce legislation on anti-bullying in the workplace. Twelve of those went nowhere, and one -- in New York -- is currently active. Illinois is not on that list.
