Please support the next WBI workplace bullying survey

Since 2003, the Workplace Bullying Institute’s periodic national scientific surveys on workplace bullying have been the gold standard for understanding the prevalence and nature of this form of on-the-job worker mistreatment in the U.S. Designed by WBI co-founder Dr. Gary Namie and administered in consultation with Zogby Analytics, these surveys yield invaluable data that have been used and cited by the media, academics, and other researchers.

The WBI surveys cost money to administer, and that’s why Dr. Namie has launched a modest GoFundMe campaign to help pay for it. If you are in a position to support this vital public information source about workplace bullying in America, then please join me and go here to make your contribution.

Thank you for considering this request!

Of gaslighting, DARVO, and flying monkeys: What fuels the emotion-laden descriptions of workplace bullying and mobbing?

(Flying monkey image courtesy of Clker.com)

Workplace bullying and mobbing. Yes, generically speaking, it’s about the experience and conditions of work. But at a human level, it’s often about apprehension, fear, and even terror. And for someone experiencing full-on work abuse or recovering from it, it’s very likely driven by the dynamics of psychological trauma.

A new lexicon

Andrea Adams, the British journalist who popularized the term workplace bullying during in the late 1980s, knew well about how terrifying, cruel, and malicious this form of abuse could be. In a 1994 speech before a British trade union (link here), she observed that, in the course of her investigations:

…people have described this experience as everything from psychological terrorisation, to emotional rape, to entering a war zone. Their accounts are all so similar that l can now predict when somebody contacts me, what they are actually going to say and the way in which they identify bullying, and their physical and emotional responses to it.

Adams’s journalistic explorations would be echoed by academic research. I frequently invoke an important study by communications professors Sarah Tracy, Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, and Jess Alberts, “Nightmares, Demons, and Slaves: Exploring the Painful Metaphors of Workplace Bullying,” Management Communication Quarterly (2006) (link here), which found that bullying targets’ narratives of their experiences “were saturated with metaphors of beating, physical abuse, and death.”

Once a targeted individual learns about workplace bullying and mobbing and certain terms used to describe its variations, a familiar vocabulary may come into play: These terms are often woven into narratives that describe their experiences in very emotional terms. They include, among others:

Gaslighting — In The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, (2018 rev. ed.), Dr. Robin Stern defines gaslighting as:

a type of emotional manipulation in which a gaslighter tries to convince you that you’re misremembering, misunderstanding, or misinterpreting your own behavior or motivations, thus creating doubt in your mind that leaves you vulnerable and confused. Gaslighters might be men or women, spouses or lovers, bosses or colleagues, parents or siblings, but what they all have in common is their ability to make you question your own perceptions of reality.

I have written frequently here about gaslighting, including its use as a work abuse tactic (e.g., links here and here).

DARVO — As explained by Dr. Jennifer Freyd (President, Center for Institutional Courage; U. Oregon, emerit):

DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle blower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.

I have written about DARVO in connection with aggressors claiming victim status in workplace bullying situations (link here).

Flying monkeys — As explained for PsychCentral by Christine Hammond (link here):

When the narcissist wants to evoke some punishment on a target they dispatch their henchmen (aka flying monkeys) to do their bidding. Unfortunately, this can and often does include abusive behavior such as guilt-tripping, twisting the truth, gaslighting, assaults, threats, and violence.

She further details the roots of the term:

The term was coined from the movie The Wizard of Oz in which the Wicked Witch dispatches monkeys to fly and get Dorothy and her dog. The monkeys obey her command, doing her dirty work for her, taunting and terrorizing Dorothy as she tries in vain to get back home. And so it is with narcissists and their flying monkeys.

Thus, we are most likely to hear references to flying monkeys in the workplace bullying and mobbing context when a boss directs their minions to harass and abuse a designated target. I have dubbed this behavior “puppet master bullying” (link here), but the choice of terminology is less significant than understanding the underlying behavior itself.

The neuroscience of bullying and mobbing at work

Why do so many targets of severe, continuous bullying and mobbing at work invoke emotional terms and descriptions in characterizing their experiences, rather than provide ordered narratives of their stories? For insight, I once again turn to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk‘s indispensable The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014).

Dr. van der Kolk summons neuroscience research on brain functioning to explain what happens to some people when experiencing or reliving a traumatic event. In essence, the side of the brain associated with emotions, intuition, creativity, and imagination — the so-called right side — becomes fully activated. During brain scans when individuals are asked to recount traumatic events, it lights up like the proverbial Christmas tree. By contrast, the side of the brain associated with logic, raw facts, linear thinking, and sequencing — the s0-called left side — shuts down. During these brain scans, it goes dark.

With this in mind, it is utterly understandable why targets of bullying and mobbing at work often describe their experiences in emotion-laden terms. Many will experience difficulty reducing these experiences to the kinds of sequential narratives that HR personnel, union shop stewards, or employment lawyers typically seek in trying to grasp what happened and whether an individual can provide facts to support their claims. This can further undermine a target’s credibility and make them appear unstable and unreliable, when in reality it is often the trauma talking.

Feeding our dialogue about workplace bullying

Hello dear readers, I’ve collect some of my recent contributions to the dialogue about workplace bullying and related topics. I’m including several that I wrote about in earlier posts in case you missed them.

Article excerpted in popular law school casebook

I’m happy to share that my first law review article about workplace bullying and U.S. employment law, “The Phenomenon of ‘Workplace Bullying’ and the Need for Status-Blind Hostile Work Environment Protection” (Georgetown Law Journal, 2000), has been excerpted in the new edition of a leading employment law casebook used in law schools, Mark Rothstein, Lance Liebman, Kimberly A. Yuracko, Charlotte Garden & Susan E. Cancelosi, Employment Law, Cases and Materials (10th ed., 2024).

In U.S. law school courses covering specific areas of law, casebooks usually comprise the main reading assignments. A typical casebook is a mix of edited judicial decisions, statutes, and regulations, often framed by the editors’ own commentaries and excerpts from legal treatises and law review articles.

This excerpt (see photo above) is part of a modest milestone of sorts. You see, the Rothstein casebook is, by my estimation, the first to include a standalone subsection on workplace bullying. Whereas major U.S. textbooks in fields such as organizational psychology and organizational behavior have included coverage of workplace bullying for some time, those in the legal field have lagged behind — in part because of the resistance of American legal jurisdictions to enact express protections against workplace bullying.

This means that law students assigned the Rothstein casebook will likely be introduced to the topic of workplace bullying, even as advocacy efforts to enact the workplace anti-bullying laws such as the Healthy Workplace Bill continue.

Although the Rothstein casebook is not freely accessible online, you may download a pdf of my 2000 Georgetown Law Journal article without charge here.

Call for amending OSH Act to include risks of serious psychological harm at work

Last fall, my essay “Expanding Coverage of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act to Protect Workers from Severe Psychological Harm” (freely downloadable pdf here) was published in the Suffolk University Law Review.  I used the opportunity to propose that we have a serious conversation about expanding the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) to cover workers from workplace hazards that are causing or likely to cause serious psychological harm. Here’s the abstract:

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act) was designed to safeguard workers from hazardous working conditions that can cause serious physical harm and death. Since becoming law, the ongoing toll of physical injuries and fatalities at work reminds us of the compelling need for the OSH Act and its many state equivalents to protect workers. In addition, various research and public education initiatives are now spotlighting workplace hazards that severely threaten the psychological health of today’s employees. Toxic work environments generally, the extraordinary workplace stressors prompted by the COVID pandemic, and workplace bullying and abuse, among other concerns, have underscored the human costs of trauma, fear, anxiety, and stress.

Against this backdrop, this essay encourages a needed conversation about extending the regulatory reach of the OSH Act to cover severe psychological harms at work and to anticipate the impact of added enforcement responsibilities on the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Most significantly, it will examine two potential policy responses: First, applying the current OSH Act to workplace bullying, pursuant to a theory first advanced by Professor Susan Harthill; and second, amending the OSH Act to expressly cover workplace hazards that may cause severe psychological harm.

Four basic postulates about women and workplace bullying

Recently my law review essay, “Four Basic Postulates Concerning Women and Workplace Bullying in the United States” (freely downloadable pdf here), was published in the FIU Law Review (2023), based at the Florida International University College of Law. It appeared as a collection of invited responses to FIU law professor Kerri Lynn Stone’s excellent book, Panes of the Glass Ceiling: The Unspoken Beliefs Behind the Law’s Failure to Help Women Achieve Professional Parity (2022).

I wrote the essay to propose and expound upon four basic postulates concerning women and bullying in the American workplace:

• First, “women are likely to be disproportionately targeted for workplace bullying, a reality that carries multifaceted implications.”
• Second, “men are disproportionately the perpetrators of workplace bullying, another reality that carries important significance for understanding relational workplace mistreatment.”
• Third, “complicated dynamics are in play when women are alleged perpetrators of workplace bullying.”
• Fourth, “the enactment of workplace anti-bullying laws can help to fill some of the legal gaps confronted by women who face both bullying and discriminatory harassment at work.”

Podcast episode about HR and workplace bullying

Last fall, Dr. Gary Namie (founder, Workplace Bullying Institute) and I jointly appeared on a podcast episode, “Wiping Out Workplace Bullying,” as part of HRMorning‘s “Voices of HR” series. The series is hosted by Berta Aldrich, a high-ranking senior executive turned author, executive trainer, and coach who engaged us in a very lively conversation.

The episode runs for almost an hour, but for those interested in a more pro-active role for HR in addressing workplace bullying, I think it is useful. Here are the links:

• Apple podcasts (audio), click here.
• Spotify (audio), click here.
• YouTube (video), click here.

Podcast episode about personality characteristics associated with bullying

Earlier this week, I was interviewed about bullying generally, and workplace bullying specifically, by the Breakfast Show of the Voices of Islam podcast, based in London. Most of the questions surrounded personality traits associated with bullying and bullies, which gave me an opportunity to discuss how both qualities of empathy and Adverse Childhood Experiences can elevate the risks of someone becoming a bully or a target.

You may access the podcast episode from SoundCloud click here without charge (free registration necessary). My segment starts at the 1:28 mark (1 hour, 28 minutes) and runs for about 12 minutes.

A rookie workplace anti-bullying activist scores a win in Oregon

Oregon legislation adopted in 2023

Recently I heard from Misty Orlando, a workplace anti-bullying activist in Oregon, who shared with me her story of advocacy before her state legislature. Ultimately, thanks to her efforts and those of her fellow activists, last year the State of Oregon enacted a directive to the state’s labor department to develop a “model respectful workplace policy” that can be adopted voluntarily by employers (link here).

Their goal was much more ambitious. They wanted to see the enactment of more full-fledged protections against workplace bullying for all of Oregon’s workers. Instead, Oregon adopted language directing the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industries to:

• “prepare a model respectful workplace policy that employers may adopt,” taking “into consideration existing respectful workplace policies”; and,
• “create informational materials that identify the harms to employees and employers caused by workplace bullying and make the materials available to employers.”

I greatly enjoyed my conversation with Misty and salute her and fellow activists for their work. This was their first go-round in advocating for workplace anti-bullying laws. Their efforts reinforce what we’ve seen in other states, namely, greater legislative receptivity to proposals concerning employer education and optional policies about workplace bullying, rather than favorably regarding new laws making workplace bullying an unlawful employment practice.

Nevertheless, this represents a step forward, and serves as a testament to effective citizen advocacy.

When dealing with workplace bullying, don’t overlook good nutrition

Last week, I received an email from Torii Bottomley, a veteran educator who experienced workplace bullying in the Boston Public School system and spent years in an ultimately successful, yet exhausting legal battle to recover workers’ compensation benefits. Her core message was simple: When dealing with bullying at work and other forms of traumatic mistreatment, don’t overlook the vital importance of good nutrition to support your health.

With Torii’s permission:

I used to say the First Response to a bullying situation would be: get a lawyer, get a notebook, and to that I would add get Meals on Wheels.

So much of the damage I am trying to heal from is the result of years of poor nutrition because I could not take care of myself.  The poor nutrition exacerbated the mental and physical toll that the PTSD took on me. IF I had thought about and availed myself to meal deliveries which I could have “afforded” at the time because Meals on Wheels is free or a contribution, my recovery would have been easier and I would not have lost so much.

(For readers not familiar, Meals on Wheels is a non-profit organization that works with local networks to provide daily, in-person delivery of hot, prepared meals to seniors and other eligible individuals.)

Trauma, nutrition, and mental health

Although healthier eating is often a casualty of psychological trauma and other severe stress generally, my exchange with Torii’s prompted me to realize that we don’t highlight this important aspect of self-care nearly enough in discussing how to cope with abusive work environments and the road to recovery.

In a blog piece for Psychology Today titled “How Trauma, Nutrition, and Mental Health Fit Together” (link here) connecting trauma, nutrition, and mental health, Dr. Gia Marson explains that “(w)hen it comes to our basic need for nourishment, trauma can interfere with healthy eating. Traumatic experiences can have impacts on food-related experiences and behaviors including”:

• Eating without routine
• Stocking up on food.
• Losing control with food.
• Restricting or controlling food.
• Consuming high-fat, sugar, and/or salt diets.
• Body shaming experiences.
• Relying on easy-to-access foods.
• Experiencing food scarcity.
• Basing decisions about food on short-term needs.
• Feeling shame utilizing food assistance.
• Difficulty planning and budgeting for food.

More from Torii Bottomley

In a follow-up email, Torii revised her suggested “First Response” kit for targets of workplace bullying to include:

• lawyer
• therapist
• doctor
• Notebook
• Meals on Wheels
• therapy animal

For those not eligible for Meals on Wheels or a similar service, I recommend searching “advice on trauma and nutrition” for ideas and guidance.

Family and friends can play an important role here, too, by providing encouragement and support to maintain a good diet, as well as cooking healthy meals or helping out with the grocery bill. In addition to asking “how are you doing?,” one might add, “how are you eating?”

In sum, maintaining a healthy diet is an integral part of one’s toolkit for dealing with and recovering from workplace bullying and other traumatic experiences. Thank you to Torii Bottomley for providing this very important reminder.

Published: “Four Basic Postulates Concerning Women and Workplace Bullying in the United States”

I’m happy to share with you my latest publication, a short law review essay, “Four Basic Postulates Concerning Women and Workplace Bullying in the United States,” appearing in the FIU Law Review (2023) published by the Florida International University College of Law. You may freely access a pdf here.

Here is the abstract to the piece:

Responding to Kerri Lynn Stone’s “Panes of the Glass Ceiling,” this article delves into the pervasive issue of workplace bullying and its nuanced impact on women in professional settings. Stone’s book identifies distinct “panes” of gender bias hindering women’s progress, with a focus on workplace bullying as a major sub-theme. The essay proposes four postulates, drawing on national surveys by the Workplace Bullying Institute and articles from the author’s professional blog, Minding the Workplace. Emphasizing the disproportionate targeting of women, the role of male perpetrators, complexities surrounding female perpetrators, and the potential of anti-bullying laws, the essay contributes to understanding and addressing workplace gender dynamics.

The table of contents pictured above gives you a bit more detail about the piece.

This piece is an invited response to FIU law professor Kerri Lynn Stone’s excellent book, Panes of the Glass Ceiling: The Unspoken Beliefs Behind the Law’s Failure to Help Women Achieve Professional Parity (Cambridge U. Press, 2022) (link here to order). Professor Stone is a long-time colleague and friend, and we have shared an interest in workplace bullying for many years. Her book includes a chapter on workplace bullying as it impacts women in the professional workplace.

My essay is less a response to Prof. Stone’s book — which I highly recommend! — and more a complement to it. I simply wanted to amplify some basic points about what we know about women and workplace bullying, based on research, analysis, and commentary published over the years.

Origin story: Stumbling upon an interview about workplace bullying

Printout found in a storage box.

Lately I’ve been sorting through a lot of papers and files that I’ve stored in boxes for years. Such was the case over the weekend, when I found a printout of an online interview featuring a social psychologist that changed the trajectory of my life and career.

During the spring of 1998, when the internet and the World Wide Web were still shiny new things, I stumbled upon an online interview with Dr. Gary Namie, who was talking about something he called workplace bullying. He explained that his wife, Dr. Ruth Namie, a clinical psychologist, had been experiencing a form of severe, ongoing, targeted mistreatment at her place of employment, an HMO, that they couldn’t quite name.

It wasn’t sexual harassment, and it wasn’t discrimination. They searched around and found that the term workplace bullying was being used in England to describe exactly what Ruth was enduring. They also learned that a related term, workplace mobbing, had been popularized in Sweden.

The Namies would take this new-found knowledge to create what they called the Campaign Against Workplace Bullying, later to become the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) which remains the foremost North American resource on workplace bullying.

***

I read that interview and my head was exploding. I knew instantly that the Namies were on to something with this “workplace bullying” thing. I would track down their phone number and call them, asking if they had explored legal protections for workplace bullying targets. They said no, that this was a project for later. At present, they were running a free hotline for those who had been bullied at work.

I offered to start researching the legal implications of workplace bullying under U.S. employment and labor law, and the Namies were happy to accept my offer. This substantial research project would result in a long law review article documenting the lack of legal protections for so many targets of severe workplace bullying, published two years later in the Georgetown Law Journal (link here). 

***

On origin stories: During the ongoing process of culling the amount of printed material in my possession, I’m often finding stuff that brings back significant memories. Some recall certain origin stories, i.e., those moments that led to significant, defining things in my life.  This is the first of three that I’ll be sharing on this blog, including lessons learned from them. 

If asked to describe the key piece of my origin story in terms of doing this anti-bullying work and devoting a substantial portion of my career to it, then reading that interview would be it. At the time, I was a junior law professor, just getting my scholarly agenda in workers’ rights and employment law & policy off the ground. The aforementioned Georgetown Law Journal piece was the final scholarly entry in my tenure portfolio, and gave me considerable momentum towards what would be a positive tenure vote. It also would lead to my drafting the anti-bullying Healthy Workplace Bill. Moreover, my outreach to the Namies opened the door to a friendship and an association that has continued to this day.

***

Lessons: So what are some of the lessons of this origin story?

• Surf around for stuff pertinent to your interests. Type in those search requests and click around a bit.
• When you do find something that interests you, dig deeper, reach out, and be willing to contribute to the body of work surrounding it.
• If you discover a compelling, unexplored foray that others may have missed or haven’t yet found, then seize the opportunity to take a lead role, being both bold and responsible about it.

***

Recommended podcast episode: In 2022, I interviewed Gary and Ruth for their WBI podcast series, asking them about their origin story concerning their invaluable work. You may access it here.

Most popular 2023 posts about workplace bullying, mobbing, and related topics

 

Image courtesy of clipart-library.com

Dear Readers, I’ll close this calendar year with links to some of the most popular new and old articles about workplace mistreatment posted to this blog, as measured by stat reports. Here’s to a safe, healthy, and fulfilling 2024.

2023 articles

• • Delving into the Dark Triad (October 2023) (link here)
  • Long-term UIC study: Chronic workplace bullying can negatively impact targets for years; laws and policies needed (August 2023) (link here)
  • Judith Herman’s “Truth and Repair,” Part 2: Workplace bullying targets and the search for justice & healing (June 2023) (link here)
  • New article: Expanding the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act to cover serious psychological harm at work (November 2023) (link here)
  • Cancel culture knows no ideological boundaries, only an eliminationist instinct (December 2023) (link here)

Earlier articles

• • Dealing with “gatekeepers” at work: Beware of Dr. No (2011; rev. 2020) (link here)
  • Workplace bullying, blackballing, and the eliminationist instinct (2015) (link here)
  • Workplace bullying, DARVO, and aggressors claiming victim status (2019) (link here)
  • On the dynamics of “puppet master” bullying at work (2018) (link here)
  • When workplace bullies claim victim status: Avoiding the judo flip (2013) (link here)

Cancel culture knows no ideological boundaries, only an eliminationist instinct

(Image courtesy of all-free-download.com)

Folks, we continue to see instances of cancel culture playing out in our society. This includes the realm of workplaces and employment. And if we’re being honest about it, we see it coming from all ends of the political and social spectrum.

Cancel culture, as I define it, is a disproportionately severe response to a perceived slight or wrong, typically motivated by political ideology, religious beliefs, or social mores. It’s an overkill, eliminationist response, like imposing the death penalty for shoplifting, or a lifetime ban on driving for going 5 miles an hour over the speed limit. And the cancellation is defended with an ideological zeal that has little or no capacity to extend a benefit of the doubt, consider a different interpretation, engage in a conversation, or exercise forgiveness.

In the work context, cancel culture can appear in the form of calls to fire someone for making an allegedly outrageous or even objectionable statement.

Of course, there are instances where termination from employment is appropriate. If someone isn’t up to the job in terms of overall performance, then it’s fair to let them go. If someone repeatedly bullies or harasses co-workers, then termination is appropriate. While a fired worker might claim that they’ve been unfairly “canceled” under such circumstances, we know that’s not true. Some folks earn their job loss, fair and square.

But cancel culture may genuinely rear its head where someone says or writes something about a controversial issue of the day. It may be via a post on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter/X, or other social media platform. Or it may be something said at a public meeting or otherwise captured by someone’s phone camera recording it. Whatever its form, the resulting outrage can quickly take on a bullying or mobbing quality. If the story goes viral, then calls to fire the supposed offender — coming even from people who have no idea what really happened — can grow exponentially.

I should add that in the U.S. employment context, constitutional issues of free speech rarely enter the picture. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution offers only limited speech protections to public employees and no speech protections to private-sector employees (including those working in non-profit organizations). The lack of a legal framework to help sort it all out contributes to a loud free-for-all atmosphere.

I’m intentionally not giving specific examples here, because I’m not trying to opine — even indirectly — on any specific situation. Rather, I simply feel compelled to remind us that cancel culture remains very much a part of our reality, at work and elsewhere. And when sharp, inflexible, intolerant points of view take on a ganging-up energy of their own, the targeted individual may face cancellation.

A veteran cohort of the workplace anti-bullying movement gathers in Boston

View of the Boston Common and the Park Street Church, from our meeting room at Suffolk U Law School in downtown Boston

From last Wednesday through Saturday, I had the pleasure of bringing together in Boston a remarkable group of friends and colleagues for some in-depth conversations about the past, present, and future of the workplace anti-bullying movement and the work that we’ve been doing as part of it.

This gathering was rather improvised, and the final schedule didn’t come together until right before the out-of-towners arrived in Boston. It was precipitated by a decision to move the Nov. 2023 Work, Stress, and Health Conference (WSH) to an online format, a switch from original plans to host it as an in-person event. This biennial conference — co-sponsored by the American Psychological Association, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and Society for Occupational Health Psychology — has long been one of my favorite events. My experiences at WSH in 2015, for example, moved me to write a blog article, “Conferences as community builders” (link here).

To Boston

My biggest disappointment about WSH’s switch to the online format was that I wouldn’t get to spend quality, in-person time with my fellow presenters. The pandemic had prevented many of us from being together for some time. (The last in-person WSH Conference was in November 2019, months before everything changed.) Over the years, during shared meals and chats between sessions, these conferences have allowed us to share ideas and suggest possible collaborations in ways that Zoom events don’t easily provide.

But then I came up with the idea of inviting my fellow panelists to Boston, where we could create our own little workshop. This would include mixing our online participation in the WSH Conference with some reflective, in-person discussions about the work we’ve been doing and hope to do. We could add in meals together and a few social events. I also saw this as an opportunity to invite some local workplace anti-bullying activists to join us for a session.

Our group included:

• Attorney Ellen Pinkos Cobb, author of global surveys of workplace bullying and harassment laws and a recent volume on psychosocial work hazards;
• Dr. Maureen Duffy, preeminent authority on workplace mobbing behaviors and co-author of leading books on mobbing and related behaviors;
• Dr. Gary Namie, director and co-founder, Workplace Bullying Institute;
• Dr. Ruth Namie, co-founder, Workplace Bullying Institute; and,
• Dr. Kathleen Rospenda, U. of Illinois/Chicago psychology professor and pioneering researcher on the health harms of sexual harassment and generalized harassment (i.e., bullying) at work.

Prompted by a suggestion from Kathy Rospenda, we spent big chunks of our four days together discussing the history, present state, and potential future of this work. We were especially attentive to how we, as veterans among this community of researchers, educators, practitioners, and advocates, could maximize our potential contributions during the years to come. By my estimation, our discussions enveloped a collective 135+ years of experience in addressing various aspects of workplace abuse and mistreatment — via academic research and writing, therapy and coaching, organizational consulting, legal and legislative advocacy, and public education.

As the de facto moderator of our workshop, I suggested that we frame our discussions around a SWOT analysis, an evaluative tool that involves analyzing an entity’s (S)trengths, (W)eaknesses, (O)pportunities, and (T)hreats. It turned out to be an excellent way to tease out broad themes, specific details, and unrecognized patterns — some tracing back for over 25 years. Our conversations culminated in identifying concrete areas where each of us can focus our efforts. During the months to come, you’ll be reading about some of these initiatives here.

On Friday, we were joined by five individuals who are playing leadership roles in addressing workplace bullying in their respective domains here in the Bay State:

• Susan Rohrbach (Co-Coordinator, MA Healthy Workplace Advocates);
• Brittany Tuttle (Steering Committee, MA Healthy Workplace Advocates);
• Rich Couture (President, American Federation of Government Employees, Council 215);
• Jessica Lapointe (President, American Federation of Government Employees Council 220); and,
• Steven Lawrence (Professor, Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology).

We were delighted to welcome these local leaders to our conversation. Whether supporting the Healthy Workplace Bill before the Massachusetts legislature, tackling workplace mistreatment on behalf of union locals, or advocating for greater awareness about bullying at work within their own organizations, they inspired us with their commitment and energy.

As mentioned above, we members of this veteran cohort have been doing this work for many years. It is noteworthy, however, that never before had any of us sat down with a group of long-time colleagues to assess progress made and to plan tasks awaiting us. We shared insights, observations, hypotheses, and more than a few stories. In addition to sharpening and refreshing our focus, this gathering meant much to us personally. It had a therapeutic effect. For readers who are part of smaller groups or communities united around common concerns or causes, perhaps this will inspire you to plan similar gatherings.

***

Our conversations during this workshop inevitably brought us back to the early days of this movement. On that note, Ruth and Gary Namie share honors for their leadership roles in bringing the term and concept of workplace bullying into the U.S. employee relations nomenclature. In 2022, I interviewed Gary and Ruth about their origin stories, as part of the Workplace Bullying Institute’s podcast series, which you may access here.