Why Does It Happen?

Ingratiation

While targets are working, getting paid to apply their talent to productive activities and perhaps loving their jobs, bullies spend their time polishing the positive impression someone high up the organization has of them. They plant lies about their indispensability to an executive. That executive will be their Sponsor. When (if) the bully’s conduct is ever reported to the executive, the target won’t be believed. Targets bring bad news about bullies to the executive who loves them. Why the love?

Simple, it’s called ingratiation. But you know it better as kissing up, boot licking and butt kissing.

The bond between the ass-kissers’ lips and their Executive Sponsors’ behinds is considered more valuable than all the money the bullies cost their organizations. Also that one relationship is worth more than the value of 15-30 highly skilled workers banished by a single bully.

Kissing up is the political lubricant that sustains the loyalty of the Sponsor toward bullies. I told you bullying is irrational and makes no sense.

It Is Rewarded

We humans are similar to rats and pigeons in psychology learning labs. Positive reinforcement following our actions makes those actions more likely. When punishment or negative consequences follow, we stop doing those things.

Employers reward bullying in a myriad of ways. First, explicit rewards are associated with bullying. Ever notice how many bullies get promoted for heinous behavior? They steal credit, but management never sees that. There are many public ways that bullying is reinforced. Second, it’s more likely that the rewards are indirect or implicit. For example, an investigation is launched in response to a target’s complaint. It is run by HR. Key witnesses either don’t get interviewed or they refuse to corroborate the target’s version of the story. These sham investigations conclude that it is a “personality clash,” or the tie between “he said, she said” could not be broken. Incomplete, disingenuous “investigations” reward the bullies. They get to continue unabated.

Worse than shoddy investigations are employers refusing to accept a complaint against the “golden child” who enjoys sponsorship at the highest level of the organization (see above, Ingratiation). Indifference to complainants sustains the bullying.

Employers must either Condemn or Condone bullying. Few are likely to condemn.

Poor Employer Responses

We asked in the 2014 WBI national survey what people thought American employers did when abusive conduct was reported to them. These were the response choices.

The translation of those statements by employers looks like this:

As you can see, by adding the denial, discounting, rationalizing, defending and encouraging response, 72% of employer responses were bad news for bullied targets. The sample for our national surveys is the pool of adult Americans. Only 5% of them think employers encourage bullying. Of course, you know better. See the above point about how bullying is rewarded.

HR is Feckless

As you can read in other Target Tutorials, workplace bullying is legal in the U.S. Without laws, employers don’t have to create policies against it. The few employers who do have policies made them toothless through vagueness or by ignoring enforcement. So, when you do mount the courage to go to HR to complain, they are likely to send you away feeling that you have no right to complain about something so accepted as a brutal boss or menacing coworker.

In nearly all cases, when HR learns about bullying, they spring into action. And not the good kind. They alert the bully that you complained about them. And if you insist on some sort of justice, HR coordinates the retaliation against you by the legal department, your boss, and your boss’s boss. Soon it becomes many against one, you. That idiot supervisor of yours will ask HR for guidance to start a PIP (performance improvement plan) for you, demoting you to probationary status despite your 20 years of exemplar service.

REMEMBER, HR’S JOB IS MANAGEMENT SUPPORT.
(They won’t tell you that.)

HR wants to land everyone in Workers Comp. You will be off work unpaid indefinitely while WC grinds its wheels slowly. Then many months later, your claim is denied and you are broke. Study the history of WC. It was invented by, and for, employers, not workers.

Ignore HR, have your physician put you on SDI, short-term disability. It gives you time, up to 90 days, to get out of the crosshairs and rest and think. And you will have partial income, depending on the plan and your state. See a mental health professional, consult a lawyer (see Target Tutorials on both subjects) and make a plan.