Bullying In The Workplace

Workplace Bully

We often associate bullying with children who teases their school mates or calling them names. Some kids come home and tell their parents about the classmate who “bosses” them around. The teasing, calling names, and bossing around are often referred to as “bullying.” Children who are bullied may refuse to go to school, fear may be instilled in them and ultimately resulting in hating school and affecting their grades. Bullying has caught national attention and is now a prominent topic in schools to bring awareness to children and parents. Schools often have steps on how to identify, confront, and resolve issues with potential bullies; however, bullies in a workplace seem to be a new topic. Identifying bullies in the workplace

Harassment defined by “US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission” (2015) is “unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information” (para. 2). Harassment targets specific protected class through sexual in nature such as gender and disability as well as creating a hostile work environment. Bullying is different, according to Yamada (2015), bullying is defined as “acting with intent to cause pain or distress to an employee, subjects that employee to abusive conduct that causes physical harm, psychological harm or both.” Roussaeau, Eddleston, Patel, and Kellermanns (2015) define bullying as “a systematic phenomenon characterized by repeated occurrences of negative acts over a sustained duration in which the target has difficulty defending themselves” (p. 2). Bullying behavior include condescending remarks or sabotaging someone’s work (Yamada, 2015). While harassment may be an incident that targets specific protected class, bullying is not demographic-centric. Bullying may be strategic in nature and repetitive or escalate overtime and deem to have long term effect on its victims (Oladapo & Banks,

According to (Ciby & Raya, 2014) the prevalence of workplace bullying is 46.8 percent among the workers in the United States, 5 to 10 percent in parts of Europe and 42.3 percent in India. Perhaps most workers have experienced bullying in the workplace but were either unaware of the behavior or the subtlety of the incident. Workplace bullying is so prevalent that California and Tennessee enacted statutes that covers workplace bullying referred to as Healthy Workplace Bill (HWB). The HWB aims to provide victims of workplace bullying damages and relief as well as allowing employers to create policies to prevent behaviors in the workplace and ultimately legal ramifications if the company fails to act against bullying (Yamada, 2015). The State of California recently added a Bill called AB2320 that mandates employers with 50 or more employees to train supervisors on “abusive conduct” (PR, 2014). Currently, California employers are mandated to train their supervisors on harassment for two hours every two years, part of the training is now to discuss “abusive conduct” (Legislaturecagov, 2015) Although there are no specific laws supports anti-bullying, some states took some form of HWB to incorporate with existing policies. According to Hall and Lewis (2014), bullying continues to exist because companies are turning their backs on the issue and there are no laws that prohibit such