By Barbara Rose
Chicago Tribune
November 12, 2007
Elizabeth White used to work for a boss who singled out a different person to ridicule at every meeting.
"Every idea the person presented was wrong," she recalls. "For the whole meeting, the person's contributions would be shot down. Inevitably he would break out the phrase, 'What kind of idiot would come up with an idea like that?'
"We would slouch down in our chairs and hope it wasn't our turn," adds White, a Chicago-area manager who quit for another job. "He was an equal opportunity picker-on." People who harass minorities or women do so at their peril because they risk running afoul of federal civil rights laws. Equal-opportunity abusers like White's former boss are subject to the laws of a free market -- people's willingness to work for them or an employer's willingness to hire them.
The bad news is, there's a lot more bullying behavior at work than ever surfaces in lawsuits, formal grievances or internal complaints. The good news is, the subject is getting a lot of attention.
There's a whole new genre of books from Laura Crawshaw's "Taming the Abrasive Manager" to Robert Sutton's "The No A...... Rule." Workers vent at Web sites such as HateBoss.com and tattle at EBossWatch.com.
So, is the world of work getting meaner? Employees seem to think so.
Consultant Freada Klein has been asking about public humiliation and bullying in employee surveys for clients since the 1990s.
"The incidence of both is increasing," she says. "There always remains a question of whether the actual number of incidents is rising" or whether people's awareness and expectations are changing.
"The important issue is, if people perceive they're being publicly humiliated or bullied, that drives talent out the door," says Klein, author of "Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay."
"The world has changed," says Marshall Goldsmith, a leading executive coach. "Most people graduating from colleges or technical schools do not have an expectation of being treated as a lesser person. Many of them know more than their boss does technically."
What constitutes a bully? It's no longer the screaming, stapler-throwing ogre of yesterday.
People who study abusive work behavior say it includes lying, breaking promises, withholding resources and delivering withering glances or the "silent treatment," along with such common hallmarks as name-calling and ridicule.
The non-profit Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., defines bullying as "repeated health-harming mistreatment" that involves one or more of the following: verbal abuse, threats, humiliation and sabotage that prevents work from getting done.
Nearly 13 percent of U.S. workers report experiencing such mistreatment within the last year, according to the institute's online poll of 7,700 workers in August. Another 24 percent said they had been bullied sometime during their working lives.
The poll concluded that bullying is four times more prevalent than illegal, discriminatory harassment.
Most, but not all, bullies are bosses -- women as well as men.
Their targets rarely confront them. Fewer than one in five files a formal complaint with their employer or a state or federal agency; 40 percent never tell their employers.
As part of a public awareness campaign since the late 1990s, the institute advocates legislation. Lawmakers in 13 states from California to Connecticut introduced anti-bullying bills but none has passed. Measures are still pending in New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Washington.
Employment lawyer Richard Rosenblatt says there's a reason these measures haven't gained much traction.
"It's kind of like beauty is in the eye of the beholder," says Rosenblatt, a partner in the Princeton, N.J., office of Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP. "There are times when people need to be demanding. That's not harassment, that's management."
Yet similar arguments that harassment is too subjective to be legislated surfaced before federal civil rights laws were adopted more than 40 years ago. Since then, the definition of sexual harassment, for instance, has broadened.
A male boss who yelled and screamed at female employees was found guilty of sex harassment even though he didn't use sexual language and sometimes yelled at male employees, too. A federal appeals court ruled that a "reasonable woman" would have found his behavior more intimidating than a man.
Most European countries prohibit workplace bullying. In France, for instance, labor codes provide civil and criminal sanctions against "moral harassment," including prison and fines. "Companies often designate someone whom the employees can visit to discuss possible moral harassment issues," says Francois Vergne, a Morgan Lewis partner in Paris.
There's little chance of a sweeping change in the regulatory or legal landscape here. But a shrinking labor pool and an impatient generation of educated workers will exert pressure on employers to clean up their acts.
