I chanced upon this article which I, at this time, can relate very much from. Read on and you might find yourself in a similar situation as well.
A workplace culture of permissiveness, blame and inaction can foster bullying.
A certain Maria was working as an employee-assistance administrator when it first happened: A co-worker started overstepping on her job.
At first she thought it was an innocent mistake. Then it happened again. And again.
Then she overheard the colleague telling her managers that Maria’s job needs to be evaluated because the company may do without her. Maria approached her managers and told them what her co-worker was doing, overstepping on her job. When confronted, the co-worker reasoned out that she was just pitching in ‘for the sake of the company’. Rather than investigate, the managers opted to be mum about the whole thing.
Maria continued to do her job. But the co-worker’s constant bullying seemed to have swayed the managers to see Maria in a wrong light.
“No matter what I did, it seemed like I was being set up to fail,” she recalls.
Eventually she was fired.
Like many victims of workplace bullying, it was only later, after undergoing psychotherapy, that Maria realized that her problems were the result of her company’s “see no evil” mentality—a workplace culture that she defines in her research as allowing bullying to become the norm.
A recent wave of research is finding that her experience—and her co-workers’ and company’s mentality—were anything but unique. The research also suggests that pervasive workplace bullying has five to six times the lasting effect of positive workplace events. It finds that bullying tends to start at the top, trickling down through the ranks, and that bullying breeds more bullying, making it an entrenched cycle that’s tough to stop.
Maria notes that some companies normalize bullying by indicating that it is acceptable—either by implicitly allowing workers to join in the bullying or by failing to intervene.
Other companies, she says, mislabel bullying as personality conflicts. They typically hold both parties responsible, causing the bullied worker to endure unfair scrutiny.
Maria notes that since most workplace cultures fail to grasp bullying’s psychological and physical effects, this workplace evil will continue to ruin companies.
Comments