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Workplace Mobbing in Academe
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psychological
harassment
In the early 1980s, a
Swedish psychologist named Heinz Leymann identified a grave threat to
health and safety in what appear to be the healthiest, safest workplaces
in the world. German was Leymann’s first language, Swedish his second,
but he labeled the distinct menace he had found with an English word:
mobbing.
Over the next twenty
years, news of Leymann’s discovery spread across Europe and beyond.
Untranslated, the English name he gave it entered the vocabulary of
workplace relations throughout Scandinavia and in Germany, Italy, and
other countries. All across Europe, not only specialists in occupational
health but managers, union leaders, and the public at large came to
recognize workplace mobbing as a real, measurable kind of harm, a
destroyer of health and life.
Strangely, recognition
of Leymann’s discovery has been slower in coming to the English-speaking
world. Newsweek published a popular
summary of research on workplace mobbing in 2000, but only in its
European edition. In Britain and America, attention has focussed less on
mobbing than on the different but related problem of bullying, and,
occasionally, on one of its extremely rare possible results: the
outbursts of extreme violence, that from time to time make headlines
across the country.
Workplace mobbing was
almost never discussed in Canada until the coroner's inquest following
the murder of four workers at OC Transpo in Ottawa in 1999. In that
case, a former employee, Pierre Lebrun, had ended the shooting spree by
also taking his own life. It turned out that Lebrun had been ridiculed
relentlessly by co-workers for his stutter, and then, after he had
slapped one of them in retaliation, been forced to apologize to his
tormentors. Had Lebrun been mobbed at work? Was this the phenomenon
Leymann had in mind? Media reports and the inquest itself tentatively
said it was.
In 2000 and 2001, The
National Post publicized my research
on mobbing in the academic workplace, the process by which even tenured
professors are ganged up on, humiliated, and run out of their jobs.
While trying to make sense of some bizarre and hugely destructive
university conflicts in 1994, I had stumbled upon Leymann’s work and
found it powerfully illuminating of the data in my files.
In the meanwhile, the
concept of workplace mobbing caught the attention of the Ontario Nurses
Association, the College Institute Educators Association of British
Columbia, and a smattering of other union and management groups, which
then sponsored workshops on the topic, much as occurred in Germany a
decade earlier.
The trauma of
being mobbed
To describe mobbing as
possibly the gravest threat most workers face is not to ignore threats
posed by slippery floors, dangerous machines, toxic chemicals, and the
other material hazards that health and safety committees properly make
their top priority.
In practical terms,
however, the worst kind of harm most Canadians have to fear at work is
the kind that arises from faulty human relations, some kind of glitch in
how people treat one another. Montreal researcher Hans Selye won the
Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1964, for the best single-word description
of today’s main workplace ills: stress. This short English word struck a
chord in both the scientific community and the public, as mobbing would
decades later, and quickly found its way into other languages. By now,
research has shown in a thousand ways the stark, even lethal effects of
too much of the wrong kind of stress on physical and mental health.
Mobbing can be
understood as the stressor to beat all stressors. It is an impassioned,
collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a
targeted worker. Initiated most often by a person in a position of power
or influence, mobbing is a desperate urge to crush and eliminate the
target. The urge travels through the workplace like a virus, infecting
one person after another. The target comes to be viewed as absolutely
abhorrent, with no redeeming qualities, outside the circle of acceptance
and respectability, deserving only of contempt. As the campaign
proceeds, a steadily larger range of hostile ploys and communications
comes to be seen as legitimate.
Mobbing is hardly the
only source of debilitating stress at work, and it was not the only one
on which Leymann did research. He interviewed bank employees who had
undergone the terror of armed robbery, and subway drivers who had
watched helplessly as their trains ran over persons who fell or jumped
onto the tracks. Leymann documented the depression, absenteeism,
sleeplessness, and other symptoms of trauma resulting from such
stressful experiences.
Bank robberies and
subway suicides were no match, however, for being mobbed by co-workers
in the personal devastation that ensued. Not infrequently, mobbing
spelled the end of the target’s career, marriage, health, and
livelihood. From a study of circumstances surrounding suicides in
Sweden, Leymann estimated that about twelve percent of people who take
their own lives have recently been mobbed at work.
How it happens
Mobbing is relatively
rare, and many workplaces hum along for decades without a single case of
it. But by Leymann’s and others' estimates, between two and five percent
of adults are mobbed sometime during their working lives. The other 95
percent, involved in the process only as observers, bystanders, or
perpetrators (though occasionally also as rescuers or guardians of the
target), mostly deny, gloss over, and forget the mobbing cases in which
they took part. That is one reason it has taken so long for the
phenomenon to be identified and researched.
That children and
teenagers sometimes join in collectively humiliating one of their number
is well known--most people can cite examples from their own school days.
The widely publicized deaths of two girls in British Columbia–Reena Virk,
beaten and drowned in 1999, and Dawn Marie Wesley, driven to suicide in
2000–have heightened public awareness of the cruel reality of swarming
or collective bullying among both girls and boys.
Leymann’s contribution
was to document beyond any doubt the same reality among adults, even in
the cool, rational, professional, bureaucratic, policy-governed setting
of a workplace. The tactics differ. Workplace mobbing is normally
carried out politely, without any violence, and with ample written
documentation. Yet even without the blood, the bloodlust is essentially
the same: contagion and mimicking of unfriendly, hostile acts toward the
target; relentless undermining of the target’s self-confidence; group
solidarity against one whom all agree does not belong; and the euphoria
of collective attack.
An example
from a factory
One of the cases that
first opened my eyes to workplace mobbing serves also to illustrate
related concepts commonly but mistakenly applied. A former student of
mine asked if he and his wife could meet with me. She was being sexually
harassed, he said, in the factory where she had worked for most of her
adult life.
The label this woman
and her husband had placed on her problem fit the facts they presented
to me. She was regularly paired for certain tasks with a male co-worker
who day after day humiliated her with insults to her work and degrading
sexual slurs. Years earlier, when she had threatened to report him to
the boss, he had grabbed her arm in a threatening manner.
Yet as this shy,
soft-spoken lady shared more facts with me, sexual harassment appeared
to be a very partial characterization of her predicament. She had in
fact complained to both union and management about the man's offensive
behavior, but to no avail. She and her husband were at wit’s end. The
leader of the union was a paragon of political correctness. A
zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment was posted where all could
see. Yet her harasser carried on as before.
Explanation could be
found only in the larger dynamics of the work group. This woman ranked
at the bottom of the pecking order. She was apart from her workmates in
three crucial ways. First, she had a partial disability, the result of
an accident at work years before, that under terms of the collective
agreement precluded her doing certain jobs. For want of physical
dexterity, she was exempt from tasks at which everybody else took a
turn. She was also paid at an hourly rate, while most others were on
piecework.
Second, though most
workers in the group were from immigrant groups, this woman was from a
different one than everybody else. Ethnically, she was a minority of
one.
Third, while most of
her peers sprinkled their speech with obscenities, took crude banter in
stride, and seemed to thrive on a relatively coarse workplace culture,
this woman did not. She was devoted to her family and her faith.
These and other
factors made her an outcast. Her problem was far worse than one man’s
harassment and bullying. It was the humiliation of daily loathing by her
peers. What drove her over the edge were comments from two female
co-workers on a hot summer day when job assignments were being rotated.
One called out so that all could hear, “I don’t want to work with the
cripple.” Another, distributing sweatbands to combat the heat, passed
this worker by saying, “You don’t work hard enough to get one.”
At that point, this
veteran of years of co-workers' hostility began crying then and could
not stop. She was taken to the nurse, who sent her home. Her husband
took her to the hospital emergency room. She was diagnosed with clinical
depression and placed on sick leave. She returned to work months later,
was again paired with the man who led the harassment and later suffered
a severe heart attack. The formal grievances she had lodged were
resolved with her early retirement about ten years after the mobbing
began.
The case illustrates
the escalation that is essential to workplace mobbing. Each higher level
of authority, in both company and union, to which this woman and her
husband appealed, was faced with overturning the will of a successively
larger group of subordinates. Steadily more and higher-level employees
over time voiced the common sentiment: this woman is impossible to work
with, she has to go.
Mobbing was
exacerbated in this case by its leader's special status in the group.
Some female workers found him sexy. He had connections for getting
cigarettes and alcohol tax-free, and in this way had forged semi-secret
ties with other employees. Acting in the role of chief eliminator, he
led the campaign to rob one partially disabled worker of her job, her
dignity, and her health. The process took years, but it eventually
achieved its aim.
Mobbing versus
other exits
Why didn’t this
factory worker quit? In the answer to this question lie clues to why
mobbing is more common in some employment situations than others.
Mobbing rarely happens to a worker who can easily relocate to a
different employer.
Mobbing is also rare
in the case of workers on at-will contracts, since they can be summarily
fired. A manager faced with ten subordinates who get along and get work
done reasonably well, all of whom despise a certain other subordinate
and want to be rid of him or her, ordinarily heeds the collective will.
If for some reason the manager does not, there is conflict but not
mobbing, since opinion about the acceptability of the worker in question
is divided.
Further, in situations
where a worker can be terminated only for cause, mobbing seldom occurs
if legitimate cause exists. On the basis of clear evidence of
substandard performance or serious misconduct, workers are routinely
terminated–firmly, but often with compassion and regret.
The worker most
vulnerable to being mobbed is an average or high achiever who is
personally invested in a formally secure job, but who nonetheless
somehow threatens or puts to shame co-workers and/or managers. Such a
worker provides no legally defensible grounds for termination, yet
usually fails to pick up subtle hints and leave voluntarily. An
attractive solution, from the majority point of view, is to bring or
wear this worker down, one way or another, however long it takes.
As the process drags
on, both sides, collective and individual, dig in their heels. It is
often as if the targeted worker has grabbed a hot wire and cannot let
go, despite the pain and injury it inflicts. The worker’s investment of
self and sense of having been deeply wronged prevent the one resolution
that would satisfy the other side.
Ironically, it is in
workplaces where workers’ rights are formally protected that the complex
and devious incursions on human dignity that constitute mobbing most
commonly occur. Union shops are one example, as in the case of the
factory worker described above. University faculties are another, on
account of the special protections of tenure and academic freedom
professors have. It happens in police forces, too, since management
rights in this setting are tempered by the oath officers swear to uphold
the law. Mobbings appear to be much more frequent in the public service
as a whole, as compared to private companies.
Mobbing also appears
to be more common in the professional service sector–such as education
and health care–where work is complex, goals ambiguous, best practices
debatable, and market discipline far away. Scapegoating is an effective
if temporary means of achieving group solidarity, when it cannot be
achieved in a more constructive way. It is a turning inward, a diversion
of energy away from serving nebulous external purposes toward the
deliciously clear, specific goal of ruining a disliked co-worker's life.
What to do
about it
As a clinician,
Leymann made his priority the healing of post-traumatic stress in those
most severely affected by mobbing. With the support of the Swedish
health service, he opened a clinic for mobbing victims in 1994, and
published detailed research on the first 64 patients treated there. That
clinic no longer exists and Leymann himself died in 1999, but 200
patients are currently treated in a similar clinic that opened in
Saarbruecken, Germany, this year.
Competent,
well-informed treatment of the many mobbing targets who suffer mental
breakdown is obviously in order, especially since they have often in the
past been misdiagnosed as having paranoid delusions.
Psychiatric injury,
however, is but one possible harmful result of being mobbed. Some
mobbing targets keep their sanity but succumb to cardiovascular
disease–hypertension, heart attack, or stroke. Most suffer loss of
income and reputation. Marital breakdown and isolation from friends and
family are also common outcomes.
An ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure, although experts do not agree on the
ingredients of the desired ounce. Believers in human perfectibility
favor enacting laws and policies that forbid workplace mobbing under
pain of punishment. Organizations as diverse as Volkswagen in Germany
and the Department of Environmental Quality in the American state of
Oregon already have anti-mobbing policies in place. It is too soon to
say what effect, if any, such policies will have on the incidence of the
phenomenon.
The impulse to gang
up, to join with others against what is perceived to be a common threat,
lies deep in human nature. It is not easily outlawed. A policy
forbidding it may, in practice, become a weapon for convicting some
mobbing target of a punishable offense and thereby aiding in his or her
humiliation. The evidence is clear by now that policies against sexual
harassment have often been used as tools for harassing innocent but
disliked workmates. Anti-mobbing policies may turn out to be even more
versatile tools for such mischief.
The tiny percentage of
mobbing victims–like Pierre Lebrun–who lash back in violent attack would
probably have lived out their lives peaceably and productively had they
been spared the excruciating pain of relentless humiliation.
All can agree, at
least, on the desirability of public awareness of the vital but sad
discovery Heinz Leymann made two decades ago, and on the continuing need
for careful, critical scholarship that builds on his. The better we
understand ourselves, including our darker impulses, the more able we
are to keep one another healthy and safe.
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For further reading, see the
easy-to-read, practical paperback: Noa Davenport, Ruth Schwartz, and
Gail Elliott,
Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace (Ames, Iowa:
Civil Society Publishing, 1999).
Heinz Leymann's original website continues to be maintained.
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