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Seldom Seen: Bully busters help in battle against workplace browbeaters
Sunday, November 26, 2000 By David Templeton
The first hint of trouble is the damage they inflict on co-workers' egos. In time, they murder office morale and, if left to their own devices, they become one-person wrecking crews who erode company profits and prompt heart attacks, strokes and suicide.
They are the Scrooges to dutiful Bob Cratchets, the Catberts to beleaguered Dilberts, the Bobby Knights to hapless dribblers.
So put on your helmets and pop some Prozac and blood-pressure medication because today we're discussing the workplace bully -- the boss or co-worker whose blitzkrieg personality becomes a workplace malignancy.
In a twist of marketplace logic, bullies who create job mayhem are exactly what American companies nurture and protect. American capitalism loves the bully who forces people to work to exhaustion, take all the blame and claim none of the glory.
But a Washington native and his wife are coming to the rescue with their international campaign to expose the national epidemic and provide a strategy for victims --targets, as they call them -- to topple the job-site tyrant.
Gary and Ruth Namie of Benecia, Calif., have written the book, "The Bully at Work: What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity On the Job." It's published by Sourcebooks Inc. of Naperville, Ill. and offers remedies for "an ailment that is ravaging workplaces, harming both people and profits.
"Silence and shame ensure that bullying will never stop," the book states. "We must work to uncover and reverse the atrocities, one person, one company and one law at a time."
Gary, 48, is a graduate of Washington High School and Washington and Jefferson College. He left Washington in 1974.
He holds a doctorate in social-organizational psychology, and Ruth holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. The focus of their careers changed when Ruth encountered a bully on her job with no resolution.
Gary said his wife's boss originally supported her, then betrayed and attacked her in a relationship that turned hostile.
"At the time, there was no name for it," Gary said. "It sounds like harassment, but it's not illegal. We were baffled. They are bullies, office terrorists, tyrants who don't respond to anything but power."
They even had to come up with a name for it, and they settled on the b-word.
Traveling worldwide to conduct workshops and seminars, the Namies started the Campaign Against Workplace Bullying in 1998 and opened a Web site,
http://www.bullybusters.org, to help people defeat bullies.
Now they are crafting legislation in California to put workplace bullying on par with sexual harassment, race, age and gender discrimination, and domestic violence. They provide arguments and statistics on why the bully should be outlawed.
"It's four times more prevalent than sexual harassment based on a university study in Illinois," Gary said. "It's a silent epidemic in the United States. One in six Americans have direct experience with bullies based on a survey of Michigan residents."
As many bullies are female as male, and 81 percent of all bullies are bosses.
Many people become bullies through job pressure but also can resort to bullying because they lack self-esteem or attempt to correct personality flaws by grasping for power. Beneath the combative veneer, bullies are cowards and liars, he said.
European and Scandinavian countries recognized the problem long before the United States, which still considers bullying a way to succeed in a competitive marketplace but prefers euphemisms such as "leadership."
That American reverence for aggression explains why bullies run rampant, creating problems companies don't care to correct. Instead, they focus on the short-term success of a bully and ignore their "long-term poison and sabotage.
"In this country, the bully is supported and the complainer is not," Gary said. "Eleven percent of targets are transferred, and 82 percent of the time, they lose their jobs.
"An employer will back the bully and bleed you dry."
Those who seek help from the company often face retaliation that can be more severe than the bully's tactics.
"We care about bullying because it's deliberate, repeated and hurtful mistreatment, and people suffer biological and psychological problems." Many targets suffer clinical depression, gastrointestinal problems, hair loss, hypertension and heart palpitations. If left unchecked, the bully can cause heart attacks, strokes and suicide.
"It's a veritable potpourri of illness, all stress-related, caused by the bully," Gary said.
While any workplace can harbor a bully, the most bully-prone industries are health care, government and education.
"It's a walking health hazard to be a nurse," Gary said. "There has been significant work in journals that say job strain occurs when you are subjected to high task-demand and low controls, which is as significant a health risk as smoking.
"But people don't want to hear that the workplace is a killing field."
Gary said its easy to explain why the Postal Service is a haven for violence that's given rise to the term "going postal."
The post office provides the ideal circumstance for bullies. Postal workers are set up for failure by demands to speed up until they can't keep the pace.
"People are literally worn down then pummeled if they can't keep up," Gary said. "They are guaranteed for failure, allowing the tyrant to come in and bark. Targets turn inside out trying to do what the boss wants. In one report, one in three postal workers experiences verbal abuse."
The Namies hope their campaign will break through the corporate mindset so employers can understand how bullies take human and financial tolls on the workplace. They cause good employees to seek other jobs, creates illness, kills morale and eventually hurt profits. There's nothing bullish about bullies.
The Namies describe themselves as "the liberation army" for harassed employees, and they hope to engender a ground-swell of support to battle the bully with legislation, counseling and public awareness. Legislation might be years away, but they feel the bully's days are numbered.
"They are church deacons, soccer moms and good people, but at work, they are transformed into hard-driving, intolerant, intemperate people," Gary said. "We want to make this punishable rather than promotable."
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