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Why Bullies Bully
Our Preferred 3-Factor Explanation
Our Preferred 3-Factor Explanation
Our model sandwiches the role of the bully's personality between two work environment characteristics, both of which are in the employer's control. This means that employers can stop bullying by tweaking the environment. With our model, solutions are possible. The Work Doctor's Blueprint for a Bullying-Free Workplace program adopts this model as a guide instructing employers what to change, rather than who to change.
FACTOR 1. Employer designs work using zero-sum, cutthroat competition principles that creates OPPORTUNITIES to harm
Employees are pitted against each other in positions or tasks that allow only one winner to emerge from deliberate battles, creating many losers. Zero-sum is the winner wins at the expense of the losers; victory is carved out of the hides of the vanquished. Zero-sum is anti-team; it destroys teams. It's a routine way to design work in sales jobs, but unnatural and destructive elsewhere. What place does strict competition have in social or public service work or in healthcare. The "competitiveness" freaks who blindly believe that competition hones perfection have got to get a grip. All learning principles are based on incremental, step-by-step acquisition of new skills by periodic reinforcement, not bone-crushing cruelty!
As one movement critic told an interviewer: "This country was built by mean, aggressive, sons of bitches," said Jeff Tannenbaum (attorney at San Francisco office of national corporate defense firm Littler and Mendelson). "Inappropriate bullying is in the eye of the beholder. Some people may need a little appropriate (sic) bullying in order to do a good job."
FACTOR 2. People willing to exploit others work there, the MACHIAVELLIANS
A small percentage of employees see the Opportunities and are willing to harm others, at least to try to harm. They are the manipulators. They are Machiavellian, not necessarily disturbed or psychopathic (see the description under Bully Personalities). Machs can and will change their behavior when Factor 3 (next) is re-engineered. Truly disturbed people who harm others have to be detected and terminated because their anti-social tendencies are irreversible given an employer's limited resources.
FACTOR 3. Employer REWARDS BULLYING
If positive consequences follow bullying, the bullies are emboldened. Promotions and rewards are positive. But it is also positive if they are not punished. Bullies who bully others with impunity become convinced they can get away with it forever. They will continue until stopped. Even reluctant bullies can be taught to be aggressive over time. We are all susceptible to changing our behavior in light of work environment conditions.
Stopping them requires nothing less than turning the workplace culture upside down. Bullies must feel pain themselves when they harm others. Punishment must replace promotions. And only executives and senior management can reverse the historical trend. To stop bullying requires employers to change the routine ways of "doing business" that have propped up bullies for years. Bullies are too expensive to keep but convincing executives, the bully's best friends and supporters, is difficult.
Our 3-Factor explanation assigns responsibility nearly completely to employers. They can alter the work environment by changing how jobs are designed and how bullying is treated when exposed. It minimizes the people factor. Truthfully, employers rarely get to choose employees whom they know very well. With a random mix of strangers, there are bound to be a few able and willing to hurt others if given the chance. The solution to bullying (as captured in Work Doctor's Blueprint for a Bullying-Free Workplace) emphasizes factors that are in employers' control, rather than people.
© 2006 Gary Namie, WBI/Work Doctor, Inc.