Posted on: Monday, August 2, 2004
Workplace bullying common, study says
By Marilyn Elias
USA Today
Employees are bullied and belittled in many U.S. workplaces, but their bosses may not find out about these abusive episodes, suggests a new survey.
It's believed to be the first study of verbal aggression in a large, nationally representative sample of workplaces. Psychologist Paula Grubb of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health presented the survey Saturday at the American Psychological Association meeting in Honolulu.
"Key informants" at 516 companies, typically bosses or managers, took a phone survey done by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
Managers at about one of four workplaces reported bullying. And three out of five said uncivil behavior, such as berating employees, had happened in the past year. "This is probably underestimated," Grubb says.
The larger the company, the more likely that bullying went on, and nonprofit job sites had more bad behavior than for-profit firms. Also linked to bullying: poor job security and lack of trust between workers and bosses.
There's definitely more scapegoating and "in your face" verbal cuts than revealed in the survey, says University of Michigan psychologist Lilia Cortina, who has done three employee studies. About three out of four workers report these experiences, but most don't complain to higher-ups, she says, "so a lot of these bosses wouldn't necessarily know what's going on."
When workers don't trust managers, a scenario tied to more bullying in the NIOSH survey, "mistreated people may be afraid to complain, particularly if the bully is a favorite of the supervisor," says organizational psychologist Steve Gravenkemper of Plante and Moran, a financial services firm in Southfield, Mich.
In larger companies, "the abuse can be buried in corporate layers, and if bosses don't dig deep, they won't find it," he says. "The only way to find out may be 360-degree evaluating, when peers and subordinates are also asked to review someone who's perceived favorably by bosses."
