More Than One In Ten Suffer Rude Behaviour At Work

Whilst bullying in the workplace has recently hit the headlines because of alleged accusations of bullying within the Prime Minister's office; according to research headlined in the Daily Telegraph this week, incidents of workplace bullying is experienced by 1 in 10 UK workers every week.
 
Charlotte Rayner, a professor of human resources management at the Portsmouth Business School, Portsmouth University, has been researching workplace bullying since the mid 1990s.

From her research a picture of the bully being a senior manager comes across with around 80 per cent of the time it being the line manager.

The Telegrapch article goes on:

"There are three broad areas where people feel as if they're under attack. First that their work is unduly criticised. Obviously that's very difficult because any manager has the right to critique work, but it's about micro-management, over-monitoring and then that leads into a second area where people feel personally criticised. Another area that people have enormous difficulty with is being isolated and excluded. That might be being isolated in terms of information to get the job done, it might be in terms of not being asked to meetings when decisions are being made, or it might be by being isolated by one's work group.

Very often bullying is about a series of otherwise minor-appearing incidents. If you look at each incident on it's own quite often one might be sceptical but when you take all the incidents together, what you're looking at is a pattern of behaviour that someone is feeling threatened by, and very often it is this pattern rather than looking at each individual occurrence.

Certainly there are areas where especially time pressure is very high. Naturally they are stressful places, but you don't have to exhibit negative behaviour towards other people."

The article also comments on the fact that workpalce bullying causes people to leave, gives the employer a bad name and hinders recruitment.

TUC guidance on workplace bullying

Source: Daily Telegraph

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