How can we step up to stop workplace bullying and harassment?

a junior member of the team would usually rank micro-managing or name calling as severe bulling behaviours but senior managers would rank them both as low-level bullying behaviours.

My first question must be about the methodology in this, which is whether all participants were given the same definition for what the researchers considered "bullying" to be before being asked the question.

The second is about accounting for the availability heuristic. A junior level employee is likely to observe bullying very rarely and therefore perceive any example as significant. Senior employees, dealing regularly with grievances and discipline issues, are likely to have exposure to far more examples and therefore use a wider sample to judge the level of seriousness.

Third is the question of what context was offered. Without supporting context, a junior-level employee presented with an example of bullying is more likely to assume that they are the victim of bullying and therefore to ascribe it greater significance. A senior-level employee is more likely to assume that the victim is someone else.

If the people in a position to deal with bullying perceive the behaviours being complained about as minor issues while the focus of the behaviour see it as bullying then where is the impetus to deal with it?

You portray this bias yourself, here, by assuming that the junior-level employee is the victim of bullying, whilst the senior-level one is responsible for addressing it.

Bullying is poorly defined in academia, much as it is in law, and we all know that bullying is often in the eye of the beholder. If they have make a coherent and logical case that they felt bullied, then the intentions of the perpetrator are largely irrelevant. A consequence is that it is exceptionally difficult to wipe out bullying because the benchmark for what constitutes bullying is going to be continually pushed down in organizations that take productive steps to eliminate it. I cannot be the only HR practitioner who regularly receives allegations of bullying that, even in the account of the alleged victim, just read like a manager doing their job and holding team members to account for actually achieving targets. Not that long ago I saw a manager accused of bullying for the dreadful sin of inviting me to join a meeting.

Oh, and me for... accepting the invitation, I think?

Bullying emerges, in my entirely inexpert opinion, from two major sources: stimulated bullying and unstimulated bullying.

Stimulated bullying is behaviour intended in pursuit of an objective and logical purpose: in order to ensure that someone completes a task, I micromanage them; or in order to discourage someone from showing up late again, I yell at them. Stimulated bullying is used as a tactic to achieve a notionally-valuable outcome.

Unstimulated bullying serves only the bully: to prop up their own sense of self-worth and to sustain the status quo in which they exercise control over others.

Stimulated bullying is, in my experience, the most common kind and also the kind we stand some chance of addressing. If we provide managers with the right tools and training and select and appoint the right employees with the right skills, in conditions that support them, then the need for stimulated bullying diminishes. In this picture, we see bullying not as the fault of the bully, but as a failure of the organization to provide the bully with more adequate resources and the knowledge to use them. There are no perfect organizations, so stimulated bullying will still occur, but we can reduce its incidence *and* incidentally, reasonably treat it differently from unstimulated bullying in the disciplinary process. A stimulated bully can be retained and supported and never bully again.

Unstimulated bullying, meanwhile, is a fundamental feature of human society and cannot be eliminated except, in organizations, by identifying the perpetrators and removing them. But they will never go away and it is futile to imagine that they will.

a junior member of the team would usually rank micro-managing or name calling as severe bulling behaviours but senior managers would rank them both as low-level bullying behaviours.

My first question must be about the methodology in this, which is whether all participants were given the same definition for what the researchers considered "bullying" to be before being asked the question.

The second is about accounting for the availability heuristic. A junior level employee is likely to observe bullying very rarely and therefore perceive any example as significant. Senior employees, dealing regularly with grievances and discipline issues, are likely to have exposure to far more examples and therefore use a wider sample to judge the level of seriousness.

Third is the question of what context was offered. Without supporting context, a junior-level employee presented with an example of bullying is more likely to assume that they are the victim of bullying and therefore to ascribe it greater significance. A senior-level employee is more likely to assume that the victim is someone else.

If the people in a position to deal with bullying perceive the behaviours being complained about as minor issues while the focus of the behaviour see it as bullying then where is the impetus to deal with it?

You portray this bias yourself, here, by assuming that the junior-level employee is the victim of bullying, whilst the senior-level one is responsible for addressing it.

Bullying is poorly defined in academia, much as it is in law, and we all know that bullying is often in the eye of the beholder. If they have make a coherent and logical case that they felt bullied, then the intentions of the perpetrator are largely irrelevant. A consequence is that it is exceptionally difficult to wipe out bullying because the benchmark for what constitutes bullying is going to be continually pushed down in organizations that take productive steps to eliminate it. I cannot be the only HR practitioner who regularly receives allegations of bullying that, even in the account of the alleged victim, just read like a manager doing their job and holding team members to account for actually achieving targets. Not that long ago I saw a manager accused of bullying for the dreadful sin of inviting me to join a meeting.

Oh, and me for... accepting the invitation, I think?

Bullying emerges, in my entirely inexpert opinion, from two major sources: stimulated bullying and unstimulated bullying.

Stimulated bullying is behaviour intended in pursuit of an objective and logical purpose: in order to ensure that someone completes a task, I micromanage them; or in order to discourage someone from showing up late again, I yell at them. Stimulated bullying is used as a tactic to achieve a notionally-valuable outcome.

Unstimulated bullying serves only the bully: to prop up their own sense of self-worth and to sustain the status quo in which they exercise control over others.

Stimulated bullying is, in my experience, the most common kind and also the kind we stand some chance of addressing. If we provide managers with the right tools and training and select and appoint the right employees with the right skills, in conditions that support them, then the need for stimulated bullying diminishes. In this picture, we see bullying not as the fault of the bully, but as a failure of the organization to provide the bully with more adequate resources and the knowledge to use them. There are no perfect organizations, so stimulated bullying will still occur, but we can reduce its incidence *and* incidentally, reasonably treat it differently from unstimulated bullying in the disciplinary process. A stimulated bully can be retained and supported and never bully again.

Unstimulated bullying, meanwhile, is a fundamental feature of human society and cannot be eliminated except, in organizations, by identifying the perpetrators and removing them. But they will never go away and it is futile to imagine that they will.