CANCER IN OUR SOCIETY – BULLYING

While this may not be your area of expertise, indeed, you have heard or experienced bullying. Perhaps when you were young because of your skin or hair color, perhaps because of your weight, height, or gender. Have you ever been put on edge because someone didn’t like your attitude, theology, moral standards, patriotism, or something you said or did? Let’s read this brilliant research on bullying and see what we can learn to help us deal with it now or in the future.

Researchers compared workplace bullying to cancer, yet employers and employees alike widely dismissed this behavior. In 1997, researchers began to explore bullying behaviors in Europe and found that the abuse intends to cause humiliation, distress, and interfere with the employee’s work performance. In the 1990s, United States workplace bullying research pioneers added repeated psychological violence and control to the description. At the same time, gleaned from past research, the terms most commonly included in the definition of workplace bullying were: behavior, pattern, unwanted, violation, harm, intent, and power difference.^[1]

Many schoolyard bullies do not stop bullying once they graduate. Instead, they may exploit their company position in the workplace to continue their bullying behaviors and abuse of others. Bullies can carry their actions and attitudes from the schoolyard into the job market and workplace. Bullying behavior occurs, to name a few, at institutes of higher learning on the internet, at medical institutions, retail establishments, or Information Technology occupations. Some describe workplace bullying as a non-sexual psychological terror that creates an abusive work environment from which the target may have no legal recourse.

Some researchers studied the effects bullying had on one’s intent to quit, job satisfaction, and turnover. The focus was on exclusion, finding relationships between age and gender, and found tenure, experience, and perceived organizational support affected turnover intentions. Others studied whether job (dis)satisfaction is the main reason for an employee’s intent to leave and included effects of age, tenure, and organizational type. They centered on how “job embeddedness” predicts job turnover, as well as job satisfaction. Employee turnover comes with a high cost to firms. It is essential to study turnover trends relevant to workplace bullying so that firms and their leadership can find tools to foster and support a less hostile and more productive workplace.

Research in the fields of topological psychology and interpersonal relations psychology, found that a person’s behavior is affected by how they feel about the individual who has harmed them and the circumstances under which the transgression occurred. Some agreed one might act out towards the aggressor in like manner, report the aggressor to a higher authority, or quit his or her job. These responses to transgressions are part of the interpersonal struggle individuals can experience when perceiving wrongdoing and interpersonal motivations of avoidance, benevolence, or revenge. This current study explored moderating workplace bullying and turnover intent. The supporting concepts of internal motivations of avoidance, benevolence, and revenge interweave with major theories into the overall purpose of this study of workplace bullying’s internal motivations and how these variables may moderate someone’s decision to quit or leave.[1]

See if you can find how these same principles and standards may affect your home life, involving your spouse, teenagers, neighborhood, workplace, and church. If you like this kind of study, we can move on to other areas of how bullying affects everyone and everything around you, not only on a social level but also on a spiritual level. Also, it may help in assessing whether you may be the one bullying or the one bullied. Let me know!

[1] The Relationship Between Transgression-Related Internal Motivations, Workplace Bullying, and the Bullied Target’s Turnover Intention by Dr. (Ph.D.) Suzanne R. Seyda-Bowen, published by ProQuest LLC, Ann Arbor, 2019, pp. 1-3