Workplace Bullying

Bullying are reported to be major and severe problems amongst adult in the workplace, prevalence figures vary greatly between studies and countries. Work place bullying are defined as persistent demeaning and downgrading of human beings through various words and cruel unseen acts, which gradually undermine confidence and self-esteem (Adam 1997). This means that bullying differs from daily conflicts at the workplace through its repeated and prolonged insults of a persons dignity. Bullying includes that the victim feels harassed and a common rule of thumb is that frequency of actions should be more than once incident a week lasting for a period of at least six months.

Managers are required to be attentive and familiar with what goes on in the workplace and should be able to recognise early signs of bullying. This legal aspect applies that organisations have the main responsibilities for creating a healthy work environment including preventing and managing workplace bullying, eventhough research shows that workplace managers are very insure and inactive in these respects and most organisations are reluctant to take these bullying related issues seriously.

Bullying could also be perceived as destroying or cracking the mental or physical health, professional career, and personality of an exposed person. Also it is reported that insufficient work control and high levels of role conflict can be seen as precursors to bullying. Studies have shown that connection between workplace bullying and ill health in the form of psychosomatic systems and severe psychological stress symptom and general anxiety disorders have also been identified in bully victims. It is reported non-bullied employees can also be negatively affected when they witness workplace bullying and in some cases can affect a victim's desire to continuing living his/her life.

From the evidence of the effects of bullying on health, one would intuitively expect that bullying would lead to increased sickness absenteeism. Also among potential organisational outcomes of bullying, turnover has been reported, whilst some factors appear to mediate the relationship between bullying and intentions to leave, research have shown that many as one in four people leave their organisations because of bullying .

Although it is assumed that bullying would impact factors such as job satisfaction, commitment, innovation and creativity, empirical evidence of a relationship between bullying and productivity remains sparse because it is hard to measure. Having said that people may be bullied irrespective of their organisational status, rank, including senior managers, indicates the possibility of a negative domino effects, where bullying may be cascaded down words as the targeted supervisors might offload their own aggressions on their subordinates. For example a bullying scenario in the boardroom may actually threaten the productivity of the entire organisation. Bullying research has revealed that bullies seen to be male more often than female, and supervisors and managers more often than colleagues.