Now workplace bullying has becoming a continually increasing activity happening in the businesses around the world, organizations and the governments have to set up a zero-tolerance workplace bullying policies to stop this out of controlled behavior. Bullying can effect a lot to the people who suffer from it especially the health effects such as depression, anxiety, and so on. This paper will more focus on why workplace bullying has become huge in the world and the how it can be physically impact the people, and what should people do when they feel they are being bullied in the workplace. Also we want to know how we can prevent bullying activity continually spread around the world, what can government do such as zero-tolerance workplace bullying policies, training of professionals, and education to stop this will also be discussed when try to figure out how to stop workplace bullying. This paper will also try to give some recommendations for future action and how the profession of social work is capable of leading to increase advocacy efforts, hope we can do some work to stop workplace bullying.
Keywords:
Workplace bullying, zero-tolerance policy, workplace bullying policy, how to,
Introduction
According to a 2011 survey that we found by the Workplace Bullying Institute, located in Canada, the results reported that one out of three Canadian workers equaling 35%, have been bullied in the workplace. The Canadian International Labor Organization, has also pointed out that the issue of work place bullying is becoming out of control based on the surveyed findings of 10 European Union countries (International Labor Organization, 2006). With statistics that showed, the organization point out that workplace bullying is covered most parts of the world. This paper want to look to discover if workplace bullying will physically effect people and how to identify bully. How fast and how big workplace bullying has been rise will also be calculated. Concluding, recommendations and future action steps will be at the end of the paper and how the social work can be the weapon to face the bullying activity which millions of people are still suffered from it.
What is workplace bullying?
The first time people ever really focus on workplace bullying was during the 1980‟s. Dr. Heinz Layman (1990) was the first researcher at the time to really look into the effects of “mobbing”, also known as workplace bullying. He defined mobbing as “hostile and unethical behavior in the direction of individuals who were unable to defend themselves”. He also compared bullying in the workplace to the act of mobbing, as he find out that the term mobbing is like when animals in a pack attack a single or larger animal. Dr. Layman identified through his research that whoever ever experienced bullying in the workplace were at higher risk of continually feel depressed, feel anxiety when they are working, and display symptoms similar to PTSD, which defined as Posttraumatic stress disorder. Dr. Layman also classified that a six month period will be considered as a round bullying duration, and for each week there should be at least one interaction. Later in this paper, Dr. Layman change it to a shortened duration of workplace bullying because he thought bullying activity is based on the incident, rather than a period of time. Zapf and Gross (2001), define workplace bullying as “consistent exposure to persistent, oppressive, offensive, abusive, intimidating, malicious, or insulting behavior by a manager/supervisor or co-worker”. We can see it that workplace bullying looks like someone doing it with some purposeful. (Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf, and Cooper, 2003). Not only the current literature shows what the bullying activity is, there are many different forms and characteristics which define workplace bullying. Mikkelsen and Einarsen (2002) reported that “experiences from workplace bullying can be compared to that of losing a love done due to an unexpected death”. The