Detroit – Stephanie Givinsky was never one to take abuse from people.
When she found herself working in an eight-person urban planning firm with a brilliant boss who regularly ridiculed, blamed and yelled at her and her co-workers, it didn’t take long for her to quit.
She found another job at a firm founded by one of her former co-workers. Everyone else followed suit, and eventually her former boss closed the firm.
“He was good at what he did,” Givinsky said. “He was good with clients and a good schmoozer, but he was also great at shifting the blame. I wouldn’t put up with it.”
Givinsky, who is now a teacher, is not alone in her suffering. One in 14 people in Michigan say they regularly experience aggression at the hands of a boss, according to a 2004 survey conducted by Wayne State University’s program on Urban Labor and Metropolitan Affairs.
While management schools have been preaching collaboration over autocracy for decades, bully bosses still persist.
Stories of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of John Bolton – the undersecretary of state and President Bush’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations – have made daily headlines recently.
Among the most fantastic stories: A foreign-aid worker said Bolton, then a private lawyer, chased her down a hotel hallway in Moscow in 1994, yelling and throwing things at her and pounding on her hotel door.
Carl Ford Jr., a former State Department intelligence chief, described Bolton as a “quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy” during Senate confirmation hearings two weeks ago.
The light this case has shed on workplace bullying is welcomed by researchers, who have for years tried to draw attention to abusive bosses and the havoc they wreak on workers’ lives and the stability of an organization.
“People who are exposed to chronic workplace problems have similar symptoms as those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Loraleigh Keashly, academic director of the dispute-resolution program at Wayne State University.
“They have anxiety, depressed mood,” she said. “There’s spillover into people’s marriages because people take that home with them. And there’s other victims: The co- workers who witness abuse experience distress themselves. The net expands quite broadly.”
What to do is quite tricky.
“There’s little you can do with a sadistic manager,” said David Sirota, author of “The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want.”
Sirota is also chairman emeritus of Sirota Consulting in Purchase, N.Y., a firm that specializes in workplace attitude issues and executive training.
There are usually two sides to sadistic managers, Sirota said. A common trait: They are subservient to the authorities above them and brutal to those below.
“Theirs is a personality that is clicking heels with their bosses and stomping on anyone who is in any way weaker, and certainly with subordinates,” Sirota said.
Since they are continually kissing up, in many organizations they are promoted, and they often wind up at very senior levels, he said.
Usually, it’s not until they’re on the verge of becoming a chief executive that their reign ends, he said.
“Certainly in terms of managing people, you wouldn’t want them there. Companies need to pay attention. There’s a slew of studies that show how you treat people has a major effect on how committed people feel to an organization,” said Mike Roehling, a labor relations professor at Michigan State University.
Studies that look at pay and treatment as factors that contribute to worker satisfaction consistently show that treating people well is crucial to retaining good employees, Roehling said.
Studies show that the worse people are treated, the more problems employers have with theft, sabotage and tardiness.
In the United States, there’s little legal recourse victims can take, unless they can prove the harassment can be tied to gender, race or disability, said Linda Burwell, a lawyer at Nemeth Burwell, PC, a Detroit law firm specializing in management labor and employment law.
“It’s not unlawful to be a mean boss or to be a jerk; it is unlawful if the boss is targeting certain employees,” Burwell said. “If he’s only yelling at African- Americans, older people or females, you have a claim.”
While few cases of harassment turn into settlements, watchdogs are claiming a few successes.
In March, an Indiana jury ordered a surgeon to pay a former hospital employee, Joseph E. Doescher, $325,000 in lost wages following a confrontation in 2001 in which a doctor screamed and lunged at him. But absent more resources, experts point to awareness and activism as a way to combat the problem.
Knowing what will attract the attention of a bully is a place to start.
According to the Workplace Bullying & Trauma Institute in Bellingham, Wash., some people make better targets for bullies than others. Medical students and nurses, cooperative people, people who put themselves down and people who are perceived as weak or insecure tend to make frequent targets.
Being aware of what makes a person a target is a first step in easing the problem.
More effective measures happen at the organizational level, according to Keashly of Wayne State University.
If a bully feels he or she can get away with such behavior, there is little that can be done. That is why advocates are trying to make employers aware of the consequences of allowing bullying to occur, Keashly said.
Advocates encourage employers to create a policy that forbids all forms of harassment and destructive personal conduct and to develop an enforcement mechanism that employees deem fair and credible.
They educate managers that destructive misconduct is not a component of acceptable management practice.
Absent such policies, Gary Namie, senior consultant at workdoctor.com, said there are three steps employees should take to better their work situation.
Bully targets should identify the problem, take time off to seek help from a doctor or counselor and, finally, expose the bully.
To effectively expose a bully, the employee needs to make a case with hard, cold numbers.
“Make a business, not an emotional case,” Namie said. “Gather data on turnover; check times people missed work. Usually there’s a lot of absenteeism at the hands of a jerk.
“Then make your case, with facts, stripped of emotion. The bottom line is: Bullies are too expensive to keep.”
Often, experts say, the best thing is to simply look for another job. After you’ve taken that step, there are things you can do to avoid ending up in another bad situation.
When interviewing, ask questions that will reveal something about the organization’s culture and whether it would tolerate bullying.
Those include requesting information about employee turnover, studying the employee manual for policies on harassment by co-workers and supervisors and talking to prospective co-workers.
Bully-proof yourself by gathering facts on office tyrant’s cost to the company
Choose a name – bullying, psychological harassment, psychological violence, emotional abuse – to offset the effect of being told that because your problem is not illegal you have no problem. This claim makes people feel illegitimate, and the cycle of self-blame and anxiety begins.
The source of the problem is external. The bully decides whom to target and how, when and where to harm people.
Bully-proof yourself, seek respite, take time off.
Check your mental health with a professional you find on your own, not the employer’s employee assistance program. Get emotionally stable enough to make a clear-headed decision to stay and fight or to leave for your health’s sake.
Check your physical health. Stress-related diseases, such as high blood pressure, rarely carry warning signals.
Research state and federal legal options. In a quarter of bullying cases, discrimination plays a role. Talk to a lawyer. Maybe a demand letter can be written. Look for internal policies on harassment and violence for violations to report.
Gather data about the economic impact the bully has had on the employer. Discover turnover rates. Calculate the costs of replacement (recruitment, demoralization from understaffing, interviewing, lost time while newbie learns job), absenteeism and lost productivity from interference by bully.
Start a job search.
Make the business case that the bully is too expensive to keep.
Present the data to let the highest-level person (not human resources) you can reach know about the bully’s impact.
Stick to the bottom line. If you drift into tales about the emotional impact of the bully’s harassment, you will be discounted and discredited.
Give the employer one chance. If management sides with the bully because of personal friendship or ration alizes the mistreatment, you will have to leave the job for your health’s sake. However, some employers are looking for reasons to purge their very difficult bully. Help good employers purge.
The nature of your departure – either bringing sunshine to the dark side or leaving shrouded in silent shame – determines how long it takes you to rebound and get that next job, to function fully and to restore compromised health. Tell everyone about the petty tyrant, for your health’s sake.
Source: “The Bully at Work” by Gary and Ruth Namie (Sourcebooks, 2003)
