Workplace Bullying: Curing the Cancer of the American Workplace

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to investigate the phenomenon of workplace bullying. Particularly, it will investigate the hypothesis that supervisor/employee workplace bullying is an issue that has great weight in modern organizational dynamics, especially considering the increasingly tight labor market the United States finds itself in today. It further postulates that the business unit that bears the most responsibility to administer programs to address workplace bullying is the human resource function. The actions of this business unit (or lack of actions) in dealing with this phenomenon have tremendous implications for the organization. The method used to research these hypotheses was to conduct an extensive literature review on the subject. This included a sampling of thought from throughout the English-speaking world. The findings of this research concluded that a radically different type of supervisor/subordinate relationship is required in this era of an increasingly tight labor market; defined the consensus on the actual definition of what workplace bullying is, and is not; identified workplace bullying as a widespread phenomenon, and not a “red herring;” identified that workplace bullying has high costs to both the employee target, and the organization; described what motivates a supervisor to bully; revealed what types of organizations foster and perpetuate workplace bullying; identified the role of the human resources department in workplace bullying; and provided advice for human resource professionals as to what they can do to both address present bullying, and prevent an environment that could foster workplace bullies in the future.