Posts Tagged ‘hostile work environment’
The other day I was reading a management magazine and I came across a term that really baffled me. Have you ever heard of ‘upward bullying’? I’ve heard of workplace bullying, workplace harassment and workplace violence and all of those, but ‘upward bullying’? So I read on. It talked about bullying tactics used by employees against their managers such as spreading workplace rumors, ignoring the opinions and views of managers and things like skipping meetings. I thought to myself as I was reading this that this sort of thing never happened to me. I would never allow such a thing to happen…or did I?
Looking back now I can remember one of our sales reps who tried this sort of thing. She would constantly miss our Monday morning sales meetings, disrupt it when she did turn up, constantly tried to pick a fight with me over sales figures of hers and many other types of annoying behavior. At the time I thought she was just being bitchy but I had no idea that it had a behavioral term associated with it. There you go. It must be a very common thing that’s happening in a lot of workplaces. Upward bullying is just another form of harassment or discrimination and it often goes unnoticed by other staff members as it’s a little more subtle than other forms of bullying. Often times the manager involved doesn’t say anything to his superiors as it could be seen a sign of weakness. However, what could cause someone to bully their manager?
A recent survey found that one of the biggest causes of upward bullying is organizational change. We have all gone through changes no matter what company we have worked for and coped really well but some don’t. And the way they deal with it is they might blame their manager for the changes and respond by bullying them in the manner which we spoke of before. Another reason for this type of behavior is related to envy. A person might be envious of your position and think that the promotion should have gone to them. I’ve had my share of that as I’m sure many of you have too.
So, what to do about it? As with all issues you have to deal with as a manager, you need to pull that person aside and find out what is going on with them. I had to do that quite a number of times with the woman I mentioned earlier and eventually got to the bottom of it all. She was just unhappy with her role in the company and wanted my job. Simple as that. Off course there’s probably no way in hell she would have got my job as she wasn’t suited for it at that time. It’s better to get things out in the open and discuss the problem than to let it fester into something that it shouldn’t. There is no shame in going to your manager and telling them what is going on. I’m sure they would have faced similar issues in their time and would be a good source of information and encouragement. Don’t be afraid to talk to them.
Bullying is a major issue and it can manifest in many forms as we have just discussed. It doesn’t discriminate against race, color, white collar or blue collar industries. Upward bullying is not something that’s discussed very much but obviously it’s there big time. The bottom line is that if it’s happening to you, don’t tolerate it. Do something positive about it as bullying is bullying and it should not be tolerated in any form at any workplace.
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