Workplace bullying and mobbing: Resources for HR

Earlier this spring, I promised a post about resources for human resources professionals who want to learn more about workplace bullying and mobbing and how to incorporate that knowledge into their organizational employee relations practices. As I’ve written here often, I am skeptical about HR’s role in preventing and responding to bullying and mobbing behaviors, given how many horrific stories I’ve witnessed and heard about from those who have experienced these forms of mistreatment. Nevertheless, excellent resources are available, and I’m happy to share some of them.

Drs. Gary and Ruth Namie have co-authored The Bully-Free Workplace: Stop Jerks, Weasels, and Snakes From Killing Your Organization (2011), an employer-oriented complement to their groundbreaking, worker-centered The Bully at Work (rev. ed. 2009). The Bully-Free Workplace sets out the Namies’ basic blueprint for employers that want to take workplace bullying seriously. In addition, the Namie’s Workplace Bullying Institute website includes a treasure trove of resources and services for employers.

Drs. Maureen Duffy and Len Sperry have written the most insightful book on workplace mobbing behaviors, Overcoming Mobbing: A Recovery Guide for Workplace Aggression and Bullying (2014). Their book is slanted toward employees, but it also includes significant advice for organizations that want to address mobbing behaviors.

Drs. Teresa Daniel and Gary Metcalf have co-authored Stop Bullying at Work: Strategies and Tools for HR, Legal, & Risk Management Professionals (2nd ed., 2016). Their helpful guidebook is published by the Society for Human Resource Management, and it provides the most insider, management-oriented perspective among the three books recommended here.

Several years ago, I worked with the American Psychological Association’s Center for Organizational Excellence to create a web page of resources for organizations that want learn more about workplace bullying. The page includes links to articles and websites, book lists, and a three-minute educational video (click above) that can be used in training programs.

Lessons from “Spotlight” for combating interpersonal abuse

Dear readers, I’ve been on the road a lot lately and not able to write as often as usual, but this evening I finished re-watching “Spotlight,” the superb 2015 movie about the Boston Globe’s investigation of the widespread sexual abuse of children committed by priests in the Catholic Church. The title refers to the Globe’s Spotlight investigative team, which spent months pursuing leads and interviewing individuals before going public with its findings in January 2002. Although the Globe was not the only journalistic player in this saga, it took the dedicated resources of the Spotlight team to document the abuse and a cover-up going all the way up to the Archdiocese and Cardinal Bernard Law.

The individual performances in “Spotlight” are outstanding. Michael Keaton (editor “Robby” Robinson), Mark Ruffalo (reporter Mike Rezendes), Rachel McAdams (reporter Sacha Pfeiffer), Liev Schreiber (editor-in-chief Marty Baron), and Stanley Tucci (lawyer Mitch Garabedian) are among those who deliver serious, believable, and understated performances. The movie doesn’t pull punches about the gruesomeness of what occurred here. Nevertheless, it avoids lapsing into overly prurient detail or Catholic-bashing. It lets the story speak for itself, ranging from the impact of sexual abuse on the victims, to the enabling culture of a city, to the powerful institutional role played by the Church in the long-term cover up.

The movie also provides some important food for thought about how to combat systematic abuse, including bullying and abuse in the workplace and other settings. (If you haven’t seen the movie, there are some spoilers ahead.)

First, as I wrote last week, abuse tends to be fueled, enabled, empowered, and protected by corrupt systems. There’s a brilliant scene in the movie where Mitch Garabedian, a lawyer for the child victims of priest abuse, tells Globe reporter Mike Rezendes that “…if it takes village to raise a child, then it takes a village to abuse one.”

Second, muckraking investigative journalism and dedicated, smart legal advocacy still make for a powerful combination. The Globe‘s reporters benefited greatly from the legal advocacy and investigations of lawyers who had taken cases on behalf of the victims.

Third, it may take multiple documented, credible victim stories in order to take on powerful, abuse-sponsoring institutions. The Spotlight team’s investigation didn’t really take off until it became clear that the victim count ran into the many dozens.

Fourth, it’s important to follow the abuse and its cover-up to the highest possible organizational levels in order to have the strongest potential impact. Globe editor Marty Baron made clear to the Spotlight reporters that accountability should be traced, if possible, up to the Archdiocese and Cardinal Law.

“Spotlight” can currently be streamed via Netflix. For the collected Globe Spotlight Team coverage of the priest scandal, go here.

Bureaucracy, administrative bloat, and organizational productivity

Writing for the Harvard Business Review, management experts Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini ask:

How pervasive is bureaucracy in your organization? How much time and energy does it suck up? To what extent does it undermine resilience and innovation? Which processes are more trouble than they’re worth?

To help tease out answers to these questions, Hamel and Zanini break down the costs of excessive organizational bureaucracy into these seven categories:

1. Bloat: too many managers, administrators, and management layers

2. Friction: too much busywork that slows down decision making

3. Insularity: too much time spent on internal issues

4. Disempowerment: too many constraints on autonomy

5. Risk Aversion: too many barriers to risk taking

6. Inertia: too many impediments to proactive change

7. Politics: too much energy devoted to gaining power and influence

But they don’t stop there! In their piece they also offer an assessment instrument, dubbed the “bureaucracy mass index,” that can help organizations compare respective levels of bureaucratic overkill. The instrument is specially for large private sector organizations, but smaller businesses, public agencies, and non-profit employers may find it useful as well.

Academic workplaces

Oh my, does this resonate for me as a denizen of higher education, where administrative bloat and top-down bureaucracy have sucked so much of the vitality out of colleges and universities, not to mention fueled skyrocketing tuition. A (London) Times Higher Education review of Benjamin Ginsburg’s The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University (2011) captures a good chunk of this dynamic:

Administrators breed unless checked. . . . Administrative prestige is measured by the number of “reports” an administrator has, which is to say, how many people report to them. Deans need associate deans, assistant deans, deanlets and a bevy of secretarial staff, less to achieve anything truly useful than to enhance their prestige – and their salaries, because one’s pay goes up in proportion to the number of staff one directs.

It would be bad enough if the administrators were simply unproductive. . . . But The Fall of the Faculty regards many presidents, provosts, deans and their underlings as positively dangerous to the academic enterprise of teaching and research.

Ginsburg drew excerpts from his book to write a shorter piece on this topic — “Administrators Ate My Tuition” — for the Washington Monthly. (For two more good commentaries, check out these articles from The EvoLLLution and Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Administrators breed unless checked. What a brilliant line! How can those of us in bureaucratic work settings help to stop this needless bloat, unwise use of money, and harmful concentration of power?

Systems enable workplace bullying, so where are the systems to stop it?

(Image courtesy of Clipartpanda.com)

As I wrote earlier this year, workplace bullying and mobbing “usually cannot flourish without organizational sponsorship, enabling, or, at the very least, indifference.” Indeed, if we take this a step further, we see that workplace abuse is enabled by formal and informal systems of people and networks.

Those who study social work or organizational behavior learn about systems theory, which is basically a fancy way of saying that human roles and interactions are complex, interrelated, and intertwined, culminating in systems that produce certain results. With workplace bullying and mobbing, dysfunctional or hostile systems inflict injuries on targets and protect their abusers. Thus, a typical campaign of severe bullying or mobbing at work involves multiple players, including but hardly limited to:

• The main aggressor(s);
• The supervisor or boss of the main aggressor(s), in order to ratify and sometimes further the abuse;
• On frequent occasion, peers recruited/pressured/incentivized to join in on the abuse;
• Human resources personnel to bureaucratically process the abuse through review and discipline of the target;
• Legal counsel to provide cover for the organization and sometimes direct additional intimidation toward the target.

These players join to create systems of abuse, sometimes tightly coordinated, other times acting in a sort of auto-pilot mode. Not infrequently, players outside of the workplace are enlisted to help out as well, thereby extending the system beyond the office or plant.

Countervailing power

On previous occasions here, I have invoked economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s theory of countervailing power. In the 1950s, Galbraith wrote that organized labor exercised “countervailing power” in the battle over the division of profits with the titans of business and investment. Today, some labor unions help to safeguard their members against bullying and mobbing; others get a failing grade in this regard. In any event, with less than 12 percent of the American workforce currently unionized, few workers can even theoretically turn to unions to protect them from mistreatment on the job.

Accordingly, most workers who face bullying at work today do so without any kind of protective system to stand up to the forces that are abusing them. Sure, they can retain a lawyer, seek counseling and health care, and otherwise attempt to create a “loose parts” network to help them, but the organized, countervailing power to which Galbraith referred isn’t present. If their employer doesn’t take work abuse seriously, they’re basically looking at a lonely fight.

I don’t have any easy answers at this point. Instead, I’ll simply say that we need to (1) revive the labor movement in the form of strong, pro-member unions that understand the harm wrought by work abuse; and (2) create other entities that can help bullied workers in a more powerful, assertive way. We also need plenty more public education about workplace bullying and mobbing in order to build widespread objection to these forms of interpersonal abuse. 

Bad bosses: The consistent jerk vs. Jekyll & Hyde

Workers of the world, given your druthers, would you rather have a boss who is a jerk all of the time or just part of the time? Believe it or not, it may be easier to deal with the full-time version.

Jena McGregor, writing for the “On Leadership” column of the Washington Post, reports on a research study by Fadel K. Matta, Brent A. Scott, Jason A. Colquitt, Joel Koopman, and Liana G. Passantino published in the Academy of Management Journal, finding “that employees are less stressed and have more job satisfaction when their bosses are always unfair than when their boss is unpredictable.”

One part of the study involved a lab experiment with college students getting feedback from a boss in simulated work environments:

To no one’s surprise, those who got the consistently nice feedback fared best when it came to the heart rate monitoring. But those who consistently heard how much it sucks to work with them did better than those who sometimes heard compliments and sometimes got burned.

The second part of the study surveyed actual workers in a variety of work settings and found the same thing:

Again, employees who had unpredictable managers were more likely to be stressed, dissatisfied with their jobs and emotionally exhausted than those who said they were always treated unfairly.

The Jekyll and Hyde boss

These research findings dovetail with what we’ve heard for years about bad bosses, workplace bullying, and workplace incivility, namely, that the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde bosses may cause higher levels of stress and uncertainty than those whose behaviors are predictable and consistent. We tend to prefer certainty to uncertainty, perhaps even to the point of opting for a reliably jerky boss over one who offers kudos one day and rants the next. After all, many of us exercise such a preference in other human interactions, ranging from personal relationships to dealing with authority figures such as police officers.

So what lies beneath these Jekyll and Hyde behaviors? In a blog post earlier this year, business school professor Joel Brockner discusses a study by Szu Han Lin, Jingjing Ma, and Russell Johnson that offers two possible explanations. The first is “moral licensing”:

One is moral licensing, which is based on the idea that people want to think of themselves and their behavior as ethical or moral. Having behaved ethically, people are somewhat paradoxically free to behave less ethically, either because their prior behavior gave them moral credits in their psychological ledgers or because it proved them to be fine, upstanding citizens.

The second is personal resource depletion:

A second explanation is based on Roy Baumeister’s notion of ego depletion, which assumes that people have a limited amount of self-control resources. Ego depletion refers to how people exerting self-control in one situation are less able to do so in a subsequent situation. Ego depletion helps to explain, for instance, why employees tend to make more ethical decisions earlier rather than later in the day.

Of course, this also begs the question of whether too many employers hire too many bosses who have low levels of ethics and self-control to begin with, leaving a very thin margin of error in terms of everyday treatment of subordinates and peers. As I have mentioned frequently here, research indicates that the higher we go up the organizational chart, the more we find leaders who demonstrate anti-social and psychopathic qualities. Accordingly, the presence of bad bosses probably means that some employers are drawn to the wrong kind of people as potential managers and leaders in the first place. In such instances, they’re more likely to see Dr. Jekyll at the interview, with Mr. Hyde showing up for the first day of work.

The 4-hour workday vs. no work at all: Utopian and dystopian visions of laboring

Could we be more creative and productive by working only four hours a day? If the work habits of folks like Charles Darwin are any indication, the answer may be a resounding “yes.”

In a feature article for The Week, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (2016), looks at the work habits of highly accomplished creative people through history and finds that they:

…all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking.

As for Darwin specifically, he authored 19 books, including the paradigm-making Origin of Species. Once a workaholic, he settled on a daily schedule that looked something like this, as Pang writes:

• “After his morning walk and breakfast, Charles Darwin was in his study by 8 a.m. and worked a steady hour and a half.”
• “At 9:30 he would read the morning mail and write letters.”
• “At 10:30, Darwin returned to more serious work, sometimes moving to his aviary or greenhouse to conduct experiments.”
• “By noon, he would declare, ‘I’ve done a good day’s work,’ and set out on a long walk.”
• “When he returned after an hour or more, Darwin had lunch and answered more letters.”
• “At 3 p.m. he would retire for a nap; an hour later he would arise, take another walk, then return to his study until 5:30, when he would join his wife and family for dinner.”

So, if you want to know how to write 19 books and fundamentally change the way we think about human evolution, you might start by cutting back on the work hours! Alright, maybe it’s not that simple — I’m guessing that Darwin’s mind was hard at work even during his “down time.” In any event, Pang’s full article is a thought-provoking read and challenges the notion that a constant nose to the grindstone makes us more creative.

When technology eliminates jobs

The idea of the four-hour workday may be enormously appealing to those who enjoy flexibility in their work schedules and who are involved in creative endeavors that generate income based on the result rather than the time clocked in on a job. But what about the vast majority of workers whose livelihoods require being present on the job for x hours a day? What if their work literally disappears? Yuval Noah Harari writes for The Guardian:

Most jobs that exist today might disappear within decades. As artificial intelligence outperforms humans in more and more tasks, it will replace humans in more and more jobs.

 . . . The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

If you want a prime example of how this is already occurring, consider corporate responses to fast-food workers who are advocating for a living wage: These workers are at risk of being replaced by robots. As Kate Taylor reports for Business Insider:

“It’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging french fries,” former McDonald’s USA CEO Ed Rensi said in an interview on Tuesday on the Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria.” “It’s nonsense and it’s very destructive and it’s inflationary and it’s going to cause a job loss across this country like you’re not going to believe.”

According to Rensi, rising labor costs are forcing chains to cut entry-level jobs and replace workers with machines. Currently, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Panera are rolling out kiosks across the US, in part because of the rising cost of labor.

Long hours by choice…or not

Here in America, we love to extol the virtues of the work ethic, and for better or worse, it shows. For example, Ben Steverman reported for Bloomberg last fall on a new study by economists Alexander Bick (Arizona State U), Bettina Bruggemann (McMaster U), and Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln (Goethe U) shows that Americans put in some of the longest work hours per week compared to their European peers:

A new study tries to measure precisely how much more Americans work than Europeans do overall. The answer: The average person in Europe works 19 percent less than the average person in the U.S. That’s about 258 fewer hours per year, or about an hour less each weekday. Another way to look at it: U.S. workers put in almost 25 percent more hours than Europeans.

This study adds to the continuous string of research studies documenting the long work hours put in by Americans, including a 1997 International Labour Organization report showing that “US workers put in the longest hours on the job in industrialized nations.”

Of course, many of those working long hours aren’t doing so by choice. As has been reported over and again in the news media, the overall state of the American economy and labor market is such that millions of workers have been compelled to take two or three lower-paying, part-time jobs in order to make ends meet.

I think we’re in quite a pickle here. Overwork — by choice or challenging circumstance — is sapping creativity, health, and overall well-being. Technology — a term that instantly causes some people to experience paroxysms of awe and wonder — threatens to make a lot of people unemployable. At the very top, a small number of people (think the McDonald’s ex-CEO in Taylor’s article) stand to grow increasingly wealthy from this dynamic.

“It’s not my responsibility”

(image courtesy of clipart kid.com)

A conversation with a friend last night and an episode of a TV crime drama I recently watched served to crystallize this line in my mind: “It’s not my responsibility.”

Naturally I thought about “It’s not my responsibility” and responses like it in the context of my bailiwicks: Workplaces, law and policy, and the community. But before I share some thoughts on that, let’s get a definition. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines responsibility as “the quality or state of being responsible,” such as a “moral, legal, or mental accountability.”

Okay, sometimes “It’s not my responsibility” is simply a truthful, accurate statement of circumstances and limitations. At work we may have defined responsibilities, and exceeding them or stepping over those of others could lead to chaos and disruption. The law establishes responsibilities and obligations, too, and exceeding those boundaries could lead to unwanted consequences. Family ties may mandate responsibilities legally and morally, especially based on closeness of relations.

Beyond that, however, there’s a huge realm of discretion where we can choose to accept or undertake responsibility or not. This may occur in the context of taking a stand, helping or protecting someone, or contributing financial support. When we exercise our discretion to take responsibility, we are making a commitment notwithstanding the lack of external obligation to do so. That commitment should be every bit as strong as an institutionally imposed mandate.

Despite religious chest-thumping by some, I have to say that we are in an age where serving as each other’s keepers does not appear to be in style. Whether in our workplaces or other communities and relationships, I hope that will change.

GTD? OMG…

Call it a lack of curiosity, but it took me a while to figure out that the acronym “GTD” referred to Getting Things Done, inspired in part by efficiency expert David Allen’s bestseller Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (pictured above). Now when I see references to personal GTD systems, I know that folks are talking about the tools and techniques they use to be efficient and productive. Usually they involve some type of notebook/journal (such as that pictured below) or digital app.

And all of this makes me very, very nervous.

You see, I’m not a GTD kinda guy. I think by most measures, I’m pretty productive. I meet most deadlines. I’m almost always at a place when I have to be (classes, meetings, social engagements, whatever), and in fact I typically show up early or right at the start. But when it comes to overall scheduling, I usually make it up on an as-needed basis. The thought of having a multi-layered GTD system sends shudders up my spine!

I understand fully how those juggling kids and jobs, or those with any type of military training, might be shaking their heads at my lack of discipline. But even they, too, must admit that their scheduling is largely imposed on them!

So, can one be both very productive and incredibly undisciplined at the same time? I offer myself as proof that the answer is yes, at least sometimes. I’m going to devote the biggest chunk of this afternoon to working in the library. And even though I have yet to decide what I’ll be working on, I think it will be time well spent.

The daily commute as an element of job satisfaction (or lack thereof)

Do you factor in a daily commuting experience as part of your overall job satisfaction? If you don’t, then maybe you should.

Shana Lebowitz writes for Business Insider on “how most of us underestimate just how miserable commuting can make us.” She cites research published in the Harvard Business Review:

That’s according to a team of researchers writing in The Harvard Business Review. They cite multiple studies that suggest commuting can be more stressful than actually working, and that the longer your commute, the less satisfied you may be with your job and with life in general.

Her conclusion? “Reduce your commute. As in, move closer to your office or find a job closer to your home.”

Urban commuter here

My commuting-to-work experiences have been exclusively by city subways. (I haven’t owned a car since 1982!) I’m more than willing to exchange suburban home space for the experience of city living.

After graduating from law school, for years I made weekday subway trips from Park Slope, Brooklyn to lower Manhattan. My love affair with New York was still in full flower, so I dealt with the frustrations, delays, and packed subway cars with (somewhat) stoic patience. The average door-to-door commuting time was 40-50 minutes, but it often felt much longer because of the miserable rush hour experience. When I look back at those years, I’m surprised there weren’t more displays of maniacal acting out by otherwise mature, sensible people!

For the past fourteen years, I’ve been doing subway trips from Jamaica Plain, Boston, to downtown Boston, where my university is located. The average commuting time is about 30-40 minutes, made much easier by the fact that a flexible work schedule allows me to largely avoid rush hour traveling. The biggest difference between this and my NYC subway experience is that I can usually get a seat on the train, which for me translates into opportunities to read a book, magazine, or newspaper.

Economic class impacts

However, I’m also cognizant of the fact that I’ve had some choices in this regard. In Greater Boston, for example, housing costs have driven more and more people into outer ring suburbs and beyond. Their lengthier commutes are often imposed upon them. Similar patterns are evident in other popular metro areas as well.

Of course, others choose to live in suburban areas, even if it means a longer work commute. Personally, I can’t understand the appeal of suburban living, but many of my friends feel completely the opposite way! In any event, smoother commutes — whether by car or by train — would be good for everyone. If we use this research data to inform how we can improve the quality of lives overall, then we should invest in transportation systems that ease commuting experiences to and from urban centers.