Getting to the Root Cause of Workplace Bullying

There are 10 contributing factors to workplace bullying, according to the University of South Australia research, which found that these factors often come back to systems and culture rather than individuals within the workplace.

“Workplace bullying is often mistaken as a problem between staff members, an interpersonal problem, when evidence shows it’s really a reflection of how the organisation functions,” said University of South Australia Associate Professor and Lead Researcher Michelle Tuckey.

She explained that the key to curbing workplace bullying lies in understanding such behaviour can rarely be blamed on isolated individuals.

“It’s a cultural issue, a systems issue – if you have a healthy culture and healthy systems, then you don’t get a lot of bullying, but if you don’t have that culture and those systems, bullying is more common,” she said.

“In a way, it’s like the symptom of the underlying disease.

“If we just focus on the bullying behavior we’re treating the symptoms, but we’re not going right back to the root causes that allow and enable that behaviour to occur.”

The research is grounded in 342 work-based bullying complaints made to SafeWork SA, and Tuckey said she and the research team analysed about 5500 pages of information to learn about what’s going on in cultures and work systems when people feel mistreated.

As a result, they were able to identify 10 areas that represent the organisational risk conditions for workplace bullying, which can be managed using a health and safety risk management framework.

The first key area relates to how rosters, schedules and working hours are coordinated, as well as breaks, leave and other entitlements.

Another key area relates to how performance is managed, and Tuckey said this involves clear job roles, the right training and development pathways.

Other areas include the allocation of tasks and ensuring workloads can be managed fairly and transparently, as well as how performance is monitored and rewarded, and how under-performance is managed.

“That’s a really big risk area,” said Tuckey.

Other areas relate to how relationships and the environment are shaped, including one-on-one relationships in the workplace, how relationships across teams are managed and the culture around mental health at work and whether it’s a physically safe environment as well.

“The biggest implication of our research for health and safety professionals is that bullying can be managed like any other health and safety hazard,” said Tuckey, who together with her team have developed a diagnostic tool which shows an organisation where it should focus its efforts and prioritise resources.

“So we’re taking a safety risk management framework and treating bullying as a work health and safety hazard, following the normal risk management approach, which is to identify hazards, assess the level of risk, implement risk controls, and then monitor and evaluate,” Tuckey said.

“Those risk control solutions can actually be monitored and evaluated and then the risk management cycle starts again.

“Many organisations already have policies, training and complaint systems in place; our tool complements those structures to prevent bullying behaviour,” said Tuckey.

Article originally published by the Australian Institute of Health and Safety.