Dennis Stolle Transcript: May 21, 2025
Anne Godlasky/NPF (00:00:00):
I am pleased to introduce our next speaker. Dr. Dennis Stolle is the senior director of applied psychology for the American Psychological Association, which means that he focuses on how to use psychological science to solve real world problems, and this includes workplace psychology. Dennis is also a licensed attorney, so this coupled with his work on preventing burnout and fostering psychological safety within organizations makes him just the right person to talk about workplace bullying, especially at a time when we’re learning of major changes in the EEOC’s approach to discrimination as well as cultural changes at workplaces across the country. So with that, I would thank you to please bring your attention and your questions to Dr. Dennis Stolle. Thank you.
Dennis Stolle/American Psychological Association (00:00:57):
Thank you. It’s great to be here with you this afternoon, and I want to say congratulations to each of you for being invited to be here and be part of this important event. I’ll be talking about workplace bullying today, and I’m curious whether any of you have before this for any reason, had an occasion to research this topic or maybe write a story about this topic. OK, see a few hands. All right. Some head nods. OK, great. Great. And in some ways, I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had to research this topic or write a story about this topic. It is in many ways a sad topic, but I am glad to hear that there are people in the room who are already familiar with it. Many of the things I say today may sound familiar to you, and I’ll be interested when we wrap up to hear about some of what you learned in your own independent research and work.
(00:01:57):
One thing that I want to do to start us off is to kind of pull back from the idea of workplace bullying and take a big picture look at what is a healthy workplace supposed to look like? And so to do that, I’m turning to the Surgeon General’s 2022 framework on workplace mental health and wellbeing. And here too, I’ll pause just for a moment to ask how many of you are already familiar with this document or this framework? OK, I see some no nods and some yes nods. I’d encourage you to take a look at this document. It is still up on the government webpage, and this is a document that a PA was lucky enough to be able to collaborate on with the surgeon general’s office. And it is really a great document, especially in terms of the references that it has. It’s got about 400 different references to scientific articles, articles.
(00:03:04):
It’s just a treasure trove of everything that you might want to look up, all kind of consolidated in one place. In working on this document, we identified five essentials for a mentally healthy workplace, all of which revolve around the notion of worker voice and equity. And those five essentials include protection from harm, a sense of connection and community work, work-life harmony. And notice we were very intentional about not saying work-life balance, but work-life harmony, mattering at work and an opportunity for growth at work. Now, when we get to the topic of workplace bullying, we’re sort of turning 180 degrees away from all of these notions. Unfortunately, when we look at workplace bullying, really one of the first things that you need to do is ask yourself, what is workplace bullying? What exactly does that mean? I wish I could give you the single accepted definition, but there is not one single authoritative definition.
(00:04:21):
And if you go out into the literature and take a look at the definitions that are used, what you’ll find is a couple of things. One, this literature comes from lots of different disciplines. There are lots of social psychologists and industrial organizational psychologists who study these kinds of issues, but there are also legal scholars. There are also scholars from fields that are specific to the industry where they’re looking at the bullying issues. And so with all these different disciplines coming together, it’s hard for them to come up with one single definition. But when you look at the literature, you’ll see sort of a theme that comes through from all of the definitions that gives you a sense of generally speaking what it is. And so what I is, I grabbed three articles to show you some example definitions so we can take a look at how those kind of converge on one idea.
(00:05:15):
Here’s one article that is defining workplace bullying as a severe social stressor, defined as a systematic mistreatment of an employee by one or more colleagues at the workplace where the targeted individual has difficulties in ending or warding off the mistreatment. Here’s another example. Different authors, different defining workplace bullying as systematic, prolonged negative treatment of I coworkers or a supervisor where the target cannot ward off or defend against the, here’s a third example, again, completely different article, completely different authors defining it as distinct form of workplace aggression that involves persistent and repetitive exposure to negative social behavior at work, which comprises harassment, ostracism exclusion, or actions that negatively affect the target’s work. So when you look at these and other definitions, even though there’s not one single authoritative definition, you see sort of the same themes repeated over and over again. First of all, we’re talking about workplace, workplace bullying doesn’t happen on the playground or at home.
(00:06:40):
It’s a workplace phenomenon. Second, we’re talking about something that’s repeated and prolonged. It’s not a one-time event, it’s something that is recurring. And generally speaking, you’ll see that all these definitions focus on a social aggression, not physical aggression. That doesn’t mean that physical aggression can’t sometimes be a component of it, but for the most part, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about somebody getting beat up at work, we’re talking about social aggression towards someone in the workplace and it’s negative and the target can’t easily find a way out of the situation. They’re stuck in this situation. So it also raises the question of is workplace bullying different than other kinds of workplace mistreatment? Because there’s all kinds of ways that you could be mistreated in the workplace, and it is different, and scholars agree on the fact that it is different and there are many ways that it’s different, but I’m going to highlight a couple of them for you.
(00:07:50):
One way that it is different is in the severity. And so it’s clear that workplace bullying is really in extreme form of social stress. It can lead to really serious and severe consequences that rise to the level of clinical diagnoses. So this is not just average work stress or the kinds of frustrations or difficulties that many of us run into in the workplace on the worst possible days at the workplace. This is something that’s much more serious than that. It’s also different than a number of other very serious forms of workplace aggression in its legal status. And so workplace bullying research is happening all across the globe. And so here for this slide, I’ve selected an article that comes out of the uk, but the situation is the same in the United States that there are laws in the UK and the United States that specifically prohibit harassment and discrimination, especially on the basis of a protected class.
(00:09:06):
So race, gender, sexual orientation, these kinds of things, that’s different than bullying. Bullying does not have a legal status of that type. And the fact that bullying exists sort of over here and discrimination and race-based harassment and so forth exists over here with a separate legal definition and a separate set of legal rules surrounding it can make the whole topic kind of complicated because harassment is bullying, but bullying isn’t necessarily harassment. And so it gets complicated when you’re talking about the two in the same where the target could be experiencing both of those circumstances. And I’m going to unpack that a little bit more as we go through and talk about some of the proposed legislation that’s out there to try to remedy these situations.
(00:10:15):
One of the important questions is how often does this actually happen? Is it actually a serious problem that we all need to be worried about or is it really a rare kind of one-off situation? Lots of researchers look at the prevalence of workplace bullying. I’m going to provide you with some statistics that come from a 2024 survey that was conducted by the Workplace Bullying Institute and the Workplace Bullying Institute is an organization that, as you can tell by the name of it, is dedicated to the topic of workplace bullying. It is run by a social psychologist, but it is not a 100% scientific organization. It is an advocacy organization that also does some scientific work. So I think it’s just important to bear that in mind whenever you look at anything that comes from the Workplace Bullying Institute. I’m not saying that what they propose is incorrect, it’s just that’s the perspective that they bring to it.
(00:11:22):
And I have up there a QR code that takes you to this report, which is chockfull of interesting statistics and so forth, and may serve as a good reference for you. In this survey, they asked in a sample of more than a thousand working a adults, two different questions. They asked whether a person is experiencing workplace bullying now or has in the last year, 14% said yes and whether they’ve ever experienced it in their life, but not in the last year. An additional 18% said yes. So it’s 14 plus 18 when you put both of those categories together. So if we just look at the 14%, 14% to me doesn’t sound like the highest number that I’ve ever heard. OK, that’s a lot. I wish it was 0%, but it’s not like half the working population is being bullied at work. But then when you really kind of dig down and think about, well, how many people is 14% of the population of working adults in the us If you take a look at that, when you take the 22 million who are in the 14% and an additional 18% that say that they’ve experienced it, but not within the last year, that adds another 29 million.
(00:12:54):
So if you put ’em both together, that’s 52.1 million U.S. workers who say they’ve experienced workplace bullying, 22 million of which are saying they’ve experienced it within the last year, put in those terms, that’s a lot of people, and that’s far too many people. One person is too many, 22.2 million is way too many. So sometimes I find it helpful to speak in the absolute numbers rather than the percentages because that kind of helps convey just how prevalent the problem is. Now, the Workplace Bullying Institute does their research on U.S. workers and the numbers that they provide. I just said a minute ago that they’re somewhat of an advocacy organization, somewhat of a science organization, but their numbers on this survey are consistent with numbers that come out of lots of academic publications as well. And there are many academic publications who have looked at prevalence across the globe.
(00:13:58):
And if you look at sort of systematic analysis of lots of these papers, you can zero in on somewhere around 15%. Is the level of prevalence very consistent with what the Workplace Bullying Institute came up with? Now, when you dig into the literature though and try to find those numbers, you’re going to see wide variability. You’re going to see reports of 2%, you’re going to see reports of 35% and so on. And there are a lot of different reasons why there’s so much range and so much variability. One reason is that it can be very context specific. And so if a researcher is looking at workplace bullying in a hospital workplace, that may be a very different prevalence than in the accounting firm. And I’m just making those up. Those are the kinds of differences, but both numbers will get reported, and so then it can get a little bit confusing as to, well, wait, is it this much or is it that much? In general though, there does seem to be a point at which everybody’s kind of coalescing somewhere around this 15% number. And in some ways that makes everybody unhappy because an average that masks the reality in any given spot, including different countries where different cultures can lead to greater amounts or less amounts of workplace bullying being tolerated.
(00:15:30):
Toxic work environments are, that’s a really popular term that you hear about lately, the toxic work environment. And so is bullying the same thing as a toxic work environment? And the answer to that is no, it’s not the same thing, but there can be an overlap between the two. So a work climate can be toxic even if there’s no bullying happening in that workplace. It may be that the workplace is so stressful in terms of demands of the workload and coupled with low pay and little benefits, et cetera, et cetera, that it becomes a toxic workplace even though there’s nobody there who’s engaging in bullying or who’s being bullied. And bullying can occur as a one-off event in a workplace that otherwise is considered to be a very healthy workplace and a place that is a very good place to work. So sometimes they go hand in hand, but not necessarily.
(00:16:31):
And so it’s important to kind of tease the two concepts apart from one another. One thing that is really interesting about bullying is, and the work that researchers do on bullying including legal scholars, is whether the focus is on the target or the perpetrator. And what I find is that when I talk to people, friends, family who have never really thought about workplace bullying, they go straight to that bully focus. And I think that in some ways it may be leftover from all of our elementary school experiences. You hear about bullying and you come up with a stereotype in your head of, oh, I know what a bully is. I know exactly what they look like, and we’ve just got to identify them and get rid of the bullies because we know what they do. That’s really not how most of the scholars tend to approach it though.
(00:17:36):
And I just grabbed a quote here from one article where a scholar is explaining that saying the concept of workplace bullying has a target perspective where it’s the total toll of the exposure, potentially many sources, that’s at the heart of the matter more than focusing on isolated perpetrators. And so what you have with workplace bullying is you may have an individual who’s being bullied at work and it’s clear that it’s happening, but you can’t really point to a bully. And the reason is because they’re getting these small microaggressions and negative slights from 30 different people in their office. No single one of those would rise to the level of, oh boy, this employee is a bully and we need to reprimand them or talk to them or potentially fire them. Yet you still have a target who is experiencing bullying in the workplace. And so it makes it a very difficult problem sometimes to deal with because you don’t have the convenience of being able to say, well, let’s just fare it out the bullies and fire them, and then this problem will be solved.
(00:18:52):
That unfortunately doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. Now, me saying all that doesn’t mean that nobody focuses on the bullies. There’s certainly research and work that focuses on that as well. And there’s work that focuses on the constellation of relationships between bullies and targets to take a look at where is it more likely to happen and so on and so forth. This is a graphic that again comes from the Workplace Bullying Institute’s 2024 survey. And essentially what they’re pointing out here is that most of the people who would be identified as workplace bullies are men. It’s much more prevalent among men than it is among women. It’s also much more common for men to bully other men, not to bully women, and for women to bully other women, not to bully other men or to bully men. And I don’t know, some people see that and say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Some people say that and say, that’s kind of surprising. That’s not the way I would’ve thought it was. Nonetheless, that’s what the Workplace Bullying Institute has uncovered.
(00:20:09):
There’s also some research that’s out there, and if you were to do, say there’s a TED Talk, and so because there’s a TED Talk, it tends to pop up on your Google search at the top on psychopaths in the workplace, and then that overlaps with the concept of bullying and the idea that there are these corporate psychopaths out there and that they are bullies and they’re engaging in bad behavior and the workplace, and that’s true. But psychopathology is extremely rare, and those instances are probably extremely rare. It’s highly unlikely that that’s the phenomenon that accounts for the 15% or more of workers experiencing this kind of conduct in the workplace. So again, it kind of takes us back to this notion of focusing on the target, not focusing on the bully. And if you were to focus on the bully, the prevalence numbers might look very different in terms of how common it’s now, an important question is how do we actually measure workplace bullying?
(00:21:19):
And so you look for example, at those statistics that I showed you from the survey done by the Workplace Bullying Institute, and they just asked people, have you ever been bullied at work? Well, that’s really open to interpretation and what’s bullying to me may not be bullying to you, and so on and so forth. And so it raises serious questions about how accurate are those numbers and how can we get at a more objective measure? So what you see in the research literature that gets published in peer-reviewed journals where there’s an expectation of high quality measures is a common measure, something called the Negative Acts questionnaire. There are various versions of the negative acts questionnaire I put up here, a snapshot of the SNAQ, which is S stands for short, so it’s a short form of the negative acts questionnaire. There’s also one that’s much longer than this.
(00:22:19):
There are ones that are in Spanish, ones that are in various other languages and so on and so forth. So all different versions of the negative X questionnaire. But if you give someone the negative X questionnaire, there’s a series of questions and they circle a number, how often they experience this and so on and so forth. And the kinds of items in there, I called out a few here on the slide, are things like being ignored or excluded in the workplace, people spreading gossip and rumors about you in the workplace being humiliated or ridiculed in connection with your work being the subject of excessive teasing or sarcasm. And you can see that all of this kind of takes us back to those definitions that we talked about in the beginning. So it’s not questions like has anybody pinched you or stepped on your foot? These are questions about social kinds of aggression, not physical kinds of aggression, and the kinds of things that are really problematic at work in particular. So being ignored and excluded at work not just hurts a person’s feelings, it causes them to not perform their job very well, which then creates this negative cycle of their not doing their job well, raises more reasons for them to potentially be teased and so on and so forth.
(00:23:42):
An interesting question that comes up with all of this is whether the targets of workplace bullying are disproportionately coming from certain groups, and it is a surprisingly difficult question to try to figure out the answer to. And that takes us back to the legal framework that I had mentioned in the beginning. So we know for example, that 37% of LGBTQ employees have reported experiencing at least one form of harassment at work due to their sexual orientation or gender identity at some point in their life. So that’s a very high number, and logically you could conclude that, well, maybe LGBTQ employees are going to be disproportionately bullied in the workplace, but then all of a sudden you get into this situation of, well, what is bullying? And if it’s harassment based on a protected class, then it’s not bullying. So all of a sudden you’ve moved them out of the bullying category and into some other category. And so that’s part of the reason why it is so difficult to really get a handle on are the targets of bullying coming disproportionately from certain groups because so often they’re intentionally removed from that analysis and put into a different analysis.
(00:25:15):
That said, it seems reasonable that there probably is a higher level of prevalence among certain groups of folks, and the influence of EDI policies in the workplace could have an impact on that EDI and whether it’s, and I say EDI, whether you say EEI or DEI or DEIA or DEIB, it’s got inclusion in there all the time. It’s always got inclusion in there. And so inclusion is in many ways the opposite of bullying. You look at that negative X questionnaire, it’s being intentionally excluded from the group. That’s the opposite of inclusion. And so where there are strong policies with regard to inclusion, you would expect that it’s sending a message that bullying is not OK. To the extent that EDI policies are on waning, then it may send a message that excluding certain people is OK, and that exclusion is one of the forms of bullying.
(00:26:33):
It’s not the soul factor, but it’s a piece of this constellation of bullying. So it’s something to be concerned about in the environment that we are in right now where there’s a lot of debate about DEI policies and the directions that they should be going and how strong those policies should be. Another interesting question in the particular environment that we’re in right now is whether workplace bullying can happen in remote work. And the answer to that is a resounding yes, it absolutely can happen in remote work, and there are scholars who are taking a look at specifically the remote work bullying, and so sometimes the word cyber bullying gets used in that context. Here’s an author defining cyber bullying as a situation where over time an individual is repeatedly subjected to perceived negative acts conducted through technology. So it is in some ways the same thing as the kind of bullying that you would see on that NAQ questionnaire, but now it’s coming at you not face-to-face. It’s coming at you through email, it’s coming at you through the work intranet. It’s coming at you worse than those kind of private communication through the teams channel that everybody in your department is on, and they all look at it and you fear got a good chuckle out of whatever somebody said about you on that team’s channel in ways that really amplify the situation and in some ways can make it worse than the face-to-face bullying.
(00:28:34):
The measurement of it differs slightly in that, again, you’re looking at these electronic type communications, and so we’ve all seen these messages in all caps or weird fonts or strange emojis or whatever it is, and sometimes you’re just not sure whether the person who wrote it isn’t very adept at communication or what’s going on, but sometimes it is nothing more than bullying the person who is constantly getting from their supervisor or their coworker. The all caps 17 exclamation point email about whatever, and it seems like the world is exploding, but really it’s not all. It’s just an effort to rile up this particular person. And this can be particularly a vicious cycle because you don’t get to go home from that. You’re carrying that around in your pocket in the form of your smartphone, and every time your phone dings, you think Maybe I better look at that.
(00:29:47):
It might be something important. Or it might be that big jerk at the office sending something to the whole team about me again. And that’s then exposing somebody to this 24/7. It also creates this anonymity for the person doing the bullying, which is no different than the kinds of things that we see with teen bullying online and so forth. People are willing to say things in written form, not face-to-face, that they would never say to another person to their face. Ambiguity creates real problems for an employer to be able to investigate it because it can often be, well, I just write in all caps, I love exclamation points that emoji that I use. I use that all the time. And those can start to sound like much more reasonable explanations than somebody explaining, well, I tell everybody that I think their shoes are ugly when I’m at the water cooler. Those kinds of explanations don’t fly, but a lot of the ones that could be used in the cyber bullying context actually seem kind of plausible, and so it makes it very difficult for employers to figure it out. And of course, the delayed consequences, the bully is not going to receive an insult right back immediately. That one ups them when they’re doing these communications over email or through voicemail and so on and so forth.
(00:31:27):
I said that there’s a focus on the target of bullying. And so what is the impact of workplace bullying on individuals? As you can imagine, it is not good. It can lead to, and all of these are established in the literature. It can lead to clinical levels of anxiety and of depression, of post-traumatic stress. And post-traumatic stress is one that has received a little bit of controversy and a very thorough review in the literature because for a scholar to say, workplace bullying leads to post-traumatic stress, a clinician who treats war veterans may say, wait a second. You have no idea what post-traumatic stress is if you think that an insult at the workplace is the same as what my patients who are war veterans have seen. But the reality is that on scales to objectively measure post-traumatic stress, victims of bullying are landing right up there at the level of clinical, not always, of course, but sometimes right up there at the level of a clinical diagnosis of post post-traumatic stress.
(00:32:56):
S emotional exhaustion is another very common reaction. And emotional exhaustion is important because it is one of the several factors that the World Health Organization uses as an indicator of workplace burnout. So emotional exhaustion gets put into the mix if you have the other factors going there too, then all of a sudden you have workplace bullying, exacerbating workplace burnout, which can be extremely severe spillover to outside relationships. And so this is people who are the targets of bullying can’t leave that at work. They bring that home with them, they bring that to their friendships, and it affects those relationships. Often they don’t want to talk about it with their friends or family, but people sense there’s something wrong, there’s something going on. Sleep disruption is a very common report and physical tension and pain. I’m talking about things like the neck pain, the shoulder pain, holding that tension constantly. And after a month or so, you’re thinking, wow, I cannot put the king out of my neck, or I can’t throw the football anymore, whatever it may have been. There’s actual physical symptoms that are coming from workplace bullying. So if we circle back to what is a healthy workplace supposed to look like, protection from harm, a sense of community and connection, work-life harmony, mattering and opportunity for growth and having voice in the workplace, it pretty much destroys all of the target of bullying, which is one of the reasons why it is so severe.
(00:34:54):
So what happens to folks who are targets of bullying, can’t live their whole life like this, or can they live their whole life like this? What’s, what’s the outcome? Workplace Bullying Institute in their 2024 survey looked at outcomes, and you see here a glimpse of sort of the advocacy aspect of workplace bullying institute that I’m using their image, and it says, target employees have a 62% chance of losing the jobs they loved for no legitimate reason. Well, we don’t know that they loved the jobs. They probably didn’t love the jobs. But nonetheless, setting that aside, I do trust these numbers to be reasonably accurate, and the numbers are pretty depressing. What you see happening is that the target of the bullying is quitting. And in many ways, that makes a lot of sense, right? What’s the easiest way out? Quit The easy way out is not to try to fight back and go through the process and all of these other things that are going to take a long time and risk risk that may bring more back on you. Sometimes the target is forced out.
Sometimes the target is the one who ends up getting fired. Sometimes the target ends up getting transferred because a manager recognizes what’s going on, thinks, oh, I better intervene here. I’ll just take the person who doesn’t seem to be fitting in and I’ll move ’em somewhere else.
(00:36:36):
And then the question here is phrased is what stopped the bullying? And you see that it’s very seldom that the perpetrator was fired or that the perpetrator quit. In fact, those percentages are so low that while that may have happened and may have stopped the bullying, it may be just a complete coincidence that this bully decided to go get a job somewhere else or got fired for reasons that are completely separate. Sometimes the perpetrator is punished, sometimes the employer intervenes, sometimes very rarely coworkers intervene. And to me, that’s really one of the most depressing numbers here is because coworkers probably have the most visibility into what is actually happening, yet they’re doing so little to try to stop it from happening according to these numbers. Now, it’s not just individuals though. It’s organizations. What is the impact of bullying on an organization? And it’s not any better.
(00:37:45):
Blast radius is a term that gets used in the literature to refer to the fact that the bullying doesn’t just harm the target. It harms a bunch of people around the target as well. Emotional contagion is the concept, and we’ve all experienced this in our life that you’re around a bunch of happy people and you start feeling happy a bunch around a bunch of sad people, you start feeling sad. That happens in the workplace. Job dissatisfaction can go up not just among the target, but among those who witness the bullying and feel that nothing is being done about it. There can be losses in productivity, losses in performance, losses in innovation, absenteeism, presenteeism. People should be staying home and they’re showing up anyway. Increased claims, lack of engagement, talent, retention problems, talent attraction problems, basically everything that an HR department does not want to have happen can potentially happen and has been linked to in the literature, the conduct of workplace bullying. So I’ve painted for you a very negative picture about a situation in the world. What can we do to fix it? And I’m going to give you what the scholars who are deepest and studying this have come up with for fixing it. But I’m not going to claim to you that it’s easy and the focus is on prevention.
(00:39:19):
It is such an intractable problem once it has already started, especially if no one’s coming forward and talking about it. It’s very difficult to deal with after the fact. And so the goal has to be first and foremost on prevention and then secondarily on dealing with it if it is unfortunately already happening. And prevention means focusing on workplace climate, workplace culture, looking at leadership styles, looking at workplace policies and procedures and looking at legislation and workplace climate and culture. Many of you already know are two different things, but they sound a lot alike. And workplace climate is sort of think of it as smaller. It’s the atmosphere or the weather forecast in your particular office on a particular day. Everybody’s upset because you lost the big contract. That would be the climate in the office that day. That’s different than culture. Culture is the shared values of the organization often passed down, the sort of taking the tone from the top.
(00:40:28):
Sometimes they’re embodied in actual mission statements or vision statements of the organization. So you would never see workplace culture being we’re bummed out, we lost a contract though that could be the workplace climate, but it’s not going to be the workplace culture. So how do you look at things like workplace climate and workplace culture? What researchers and practitioners in this area suggest among other things, is engaging in focus groups and surveys and other kinds of data collection methods to find out what’s happening in your organization. I’ve put up here a questionnaire called Perceived organizational support, which is one questionnaire that gets used in this context sometimes, and you’ll see it has questions like senior management show support for stress prevention through involvement and commitment. Senior management acts decisively when a concern of an employee’s psychological status is raised. Senior management clearly considers psychological health of employees to be of great importance.
(00:41:38):
So you can see how you administer a survey like this. You look at the results, you could pretty quickly get a sense of, wow, we seem OK or we seem great, or it seems like nobody’s paying attention to these kinds of issues. And if you’re in the nobody’s paying attention to these kinds of issues situation, then you’re ripe for engaging in higher levels of prevention. Psychological safety is a concept that probably many or all of you are familiar with. It doesn’t relate specifically to bullying, but psychological safety is the concept of being able to be yourself in the workplace and truly share your voice and your opinions without fear of being ridiculed or back stabbed or anything like that. It is almost antithetical to the concept of workplace bullying. So if you foster workplace psychological safety, which is a good thing to foster for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with bullying, you should see a drop in the prevalence of workplace bullying.
(00:42:49):
At the same time, leadership styles are important, and a lot of researchers have looked at, are there certain leadership styles that tend to foster bullying? The Kurt Lewin leadership styles framework is a very old one. There are many much newer leadership style frameworks that are much more sophisticated, but even though it’s old, he’s sort of really got it right the first time around, even though it’s not super sophisticated. And he comes up with three types of leaders, the autocratic leader, the one who’s do this, the democratic leader who says, what do y’all want to do? And the laissez-faire leader who says, go do stuff. And what the research consistently shows is it’s that laissez-faire leader that creates the environment that is ripe for bullying because it’s the laissez-faire leadership who’s just going to say, you’re having interpersonal problems. Yeah, I’ll go work that out yourself.
(00:43:51):
I’m going to go back to my office and do my stuff. So ending laissez-faire leadership, there’s a lot of good reasons to do that because it’s not a good leadership style ending or diminishing workplace bullying is one of the good reasons for doing that. I mentioned workplace policies as also being important, and there are researchers and practitioners who have looked at, well, what kind of a workplace policy would work best? And what tends to be the default approach of most organizations is a reactive and punitive approach. So the policy is we will sit back and do nothing until we receive a complaint. And when we do receive the complaint, the number one priority is going to be to punish that person who is the wrongdoer. And the research shows that’s not actually very effective for preventing workplace bullying. It’s not very effective for catching it early, and it’s not very effective for encouraging people to report the behaviors.
(00:45:02):
And much more effective policies are ones that are proactive. And so there’s a schedule on which managers or HR folks will go out and actively talk to people and say, what’s been going on in your workspace? Well, how’s your relationship with this person and that person? And try to identify whether there are issues proactively, and then to focus on how to fix the issues as the number one priority rather than making the number one priority, let’s go punish somebody for having done something wrong. Legislation is another potential avenue to fix the workplace bullying problem. What I put up here on the slide is a table, again from the Workplace Bullying Institute’s recent survey. And their general point with this table is that people are OK with the idea of legislation that is going to prevent workplace bullying. For the most part, people are not adverse to that notion.
(00:46:12):
The reality is that very, very few states in the U.S. have any laws whatsoever that are specific to workplace bullying. One exception is Tennessee. And Tennessee is an interesting example because they first passed their law, I think it was in 2014, and it’s been updated a few times since then, and it is, has good and bad. It is very prevention oriented. And so it has that going for it. And it was clearly informed by some of the work that’s being done on how to deal with workplace bullying by taking that preventative orientation. But there are also many people who criticize the model used in Tennessee as being way too employer friendly. And what I mean by that is that if there was no special law relating to workplace bullying, probably your legal avenue of attack as the target would be to file a lawsuit for the tort called intentional infliction of emotional distress.
(00:47:27):
That tort has been around for hundreds of years and there’s all kinds of case law out there. You’re not allowed to intentionally cause someone else emotional distress. To win a lawsuit like that is very difficult. The standard is very high, it’s very difficult to come up with the proof of intentionality and so on and so forth. But if you win a lawsuit like that, you could potentially win a lot of money because you could even potentially get punitive damages to punish the employer who allowed this to go on. So what the Tennessee legislation did is said, Hey, employers, we’re going to shield you from intentional infliction of emotional distress lawsuits. We’re going to say those are not allowed to be brought against you if you have a good bullying prevention policy in place. And here’s an example of a good bullying prevention policy that you could put into place.
(00:48:24):
So in some ways, that seems like a good deal. It’s preventative, it puts a good policy into place, but the criticism is, well wait a second. You just eliminated all the legal liability to the employer for this happening by allowing them to have a policy in place. So in reaction to that, there have been new model acts written by a number of different folks. The Workplace Bullying Accountability Act was largely written by David Yama, who I’m going to talk to you a little bit more about. He’s an old friend of mine and he has been studying workplace bullying for a very long time. He’s an attorney and he wrote a model act that essentially creates a duty for employers to actively prevent workplace bullying and does not take away the legal rights of a target of workplace bullying. So it’s not been passed in any state yet. There’s lots of lobbying that’s out there happening to try to get it passed somewhere. Maybe that will happen.
(00:49:32):
I want to leave you with a few experts on workplace bullying in case it is ever a helpful resource for you to have. I just mentioned David Ya again, an old friend of mine. He’s a law professor at university. He’s the director of the New Workplace Institute. He’s great on all the legal aspects, all the employment law aspects of this. Dr. Gary Namie is a social psychologist. He’s the man who runs the Workplace Bullying Institute. He’s fantastic on the social psychological aspects of the bullying dynamic. Dr. Leah Hollis, she’s the associate dean for equity and inclusion and a professor of education at Penn State. She’s written a lot about the issue of the intersection between race-based and gender-based harassment and bullying. Very difficult. I’ve already said to disentangle and she’s tackled that topic. He’s a great expert on that. Dr. Michael der, another social psychologist from outside the U.S. who’s done a lot of work looking at bullying in other countries and is just a fantastic resource. You do any literature searches, you’re going to see his name coming up over and over and over again. So with that, what I’d like to do is pause here and open it up for thoughts, questions, reactions.
Katie Brandt | Chicago Health Magazine (00:51:03):
Excuse me. Thank you. I’m Katie from Chicago Health Magazine. I was just wondering, I think all of this is coworker to coworker bullying. Would any of it do in the surveys or anything be from in a hospital setting patients to healthcare workers or in a restaurant patrons to workers?
Dennis Stolle/American Psychological Association (00:51:28):
Yes, and I’m going to do two distinctions here. There’s the coworker to coworker, there’s also the supervisor to coworker, and then there’s the patron to worker. There’s a lot out there on coworker to coworker and supervisor to worker. And in fact, if you go to the Workplace Bullying Institute ’24 survey, they have lots of numbers in there about what’s the prevalence of supervisor to direct report bullying versus coworker to coworker bullying. I’m aware of much less research on the situation of being bullied by a patron. I would suspect, I’m just speculating here. I would suspect that part of the reason for that is because the very definition of workplace bullying is this repeated interaction. And so a one-off with a really awful patient is going to go away. Even if you have to care, a nurse has to care for that patient for a month.
(00:52:39):
It still isn’t really what researchers would put into the bullying category because it’s going to end and because there’s more mechanisms to ward that off and so on and so forth. But I do think that there’s probably a serious reality of bullying and long-term client relationships. So that would put you say the corporate accountant who has been doing the books for ABC company for years and needs to do the books for ABC company, the biggest account the firm has, and the person inside an ABC company just goes after that person day after day after day. That could be the kind of bullying that I think you have in mind. Probably more rare and more difficult to study though, but just as important.
Candace Y.A. Montague | Independent (00:53:30):
OK, thank you. Hi, Candace Montague. I’m the freelance journalist. I wonder how cultural differences can be played into the workplace bullying complaints, because some people come from a culture where you speak to people this way or you take orders or you give orders that way, and it’s just how they were raised, I guess you could say. And has there been any research about how cultural differences make, how cultural backgrounds make a difference in bullying, or has there been any solutions that have come about because of that? It probably is the case for more DEI training, but I won’t say that the science probably arrest me,
Dennis Stolle/American Psychological Association (00:54:19):
Right? There’s sort of the, I’m going to say capital C culture and lowercase C culture like the capital C culture. Bullying may be a lot worse in, I don’t know, pick a country than it is in some other country, and there has absolutely been that kind of cross-cultural research, and I can’t quote you the findings from memory, but there’s no doubt that there are cultural differences from one country to another. There are some countries where workplace bullying just is rampant and other countries where it is absolutely not tolerated, and so it just doesn’t happen. Then there’s sort of the lowercase C culture of workplaces bring people together from different backgrounds who have been raised differently and just approach the world differently. And that does definitely make a difference and is one of the things that makes it such a wicked problem to try to solve because you don’t want to under those punitive type policies, you don’t want to punish somebody for behaving in a way that they think is appropriate, how they were raised to talk to their coworkers Under the non-punitive policy type approach, you do want to intervene and say, look, we get that you’re not trying to be a bully, but you’re being perceived by some people as a bully, and here’s three tips for things that you could do differently, and we’re going to start looking for you to do those things differently.
(00:56:00):
At the next review, we’re going to talk about this again, that kind of an approach could be very effective and that sort of small C culture. There’s also, and this is one that you can definitely find in the literature, huge variation between different workplace cultures. And so bullying tends to be more prevalent in workplace cultures that involve a lot of physically close personal interaction with your coworkers. If you dig a hole together with your coworker every day, you move the patient from this bed to that bed with your coworker every day. Those kinds of interactions, for whatever reason, tend to create an environment where bullying can bubble up much more so than everybody going into their office and working on their spreadsheets and then only coming together at lunchtime.
Julia Carpenter | Independent (00:57:02):
Go ahead. My name is Julia Carpenter. Oh, thanks. My name is Julia Carpenter. I’m a freelance journalist. I am curious about how complaints of workplace bullying have changed over time. I’m thinking about potential effects of me too, for example, but then also complaints of cancel culture and how that could lead to a decrease in the number of complaints. Really curious if we know how this has changed over time or if we’re still trying to collect data to tell us more.
Dennis Stolle/American Psychological Association (00:57:38):
Yeah, the simple answer is, I don’t have an answer for you, but I’m going to speculate that with a little bit of effort you can find at least a glimmer of an answer to that. And the Workplace Bullying Institute’s survey that they do, and they didn’t do it only in 24, they’ve done it in other years as well, would be a good source because you would expect that they’re tracking that over the course of time. And then there are lots of logical reasons like the ones that you mentioned, why you might expect rates to increase at times when certain cultural phenomenons or certain cultural awarenesses are heightened. Thank you.
Randy Yohe | West Virginia Public Broadcasting (00:58:22):
Hi, I’m Randy from West Virginia Public Broadcasting on a pie chart that you had a minimal coworkers intervening in a bullying situation, but bullying’s not necessarily obvious to coworkers, is it? I mean, it can be clandestine, it can be something that a coworker may have no clue about that it might be going on with maybe one, if not more coworkers, right?
Dennis Stolle/American Psychological Association (00:58:45):
Yeah, it could go either way. It could be the kind of thing where part of what is giving the incentive for the bullying is the public display of the bullying when you get everybody in the room to laugh a little bit, and that gives the bully a charge. So that would be a situation where it’s obvious to everyone in the room, but there could also just, as you said, very well be the instances where it’s only when you’re alone with this person at the water cooler that they say these things to you and they’re oddly smooth enough to never say such a when other people are around, and it makes it extremely difficult. Who would believe you if you claimed that they did such things?
Amira Sweilem | NJ.com (00:59:33):
Amira Sweilem at NJ.com and the Star Ledger I, I wanted to ask two related data questions about the legislation passed in Tennessee. The first is, do you know if there have been surveys that have sort of measured if workplace bullying has gotten better after the legislation was passed? And then the second question is, do you know if lawsuits have decreased as a result?
Dennis Stolle/American Psychological Association (01:00:02):
So I don’t have hard data at my fingertips on either one of those. If I was going to go look for that data, I would go to the entities that are trying to get competing model acts passed in other states, because that would be the leverage that you would use with a legislature is to say, look, don’t do what Tennessee did because we know that doesn’t work. Instead, use the model act that we drafted and use it in your state. So that’s sort of who I expect would be particularly interested in that kind of data because it would be useful for them. And on the second piece of whether lawsuits have gone down, sort of same answer, those folks would be particularly interested in that. I don’t know for sure. If I had to guess, which is always a bad idea, I would say absolutely. They’ve gone down because Tennessee basically took away the right to sue.
Alyssa Goldberg | U.S.A Today (01:01:06):
Final question to Alyssa. Hi, my name’s Alyssa Goldberg. I’m with USA Today. I know we talked a bit about corporate work settings as well as a bit touching on the healthcare burnout. I used to work in the music industry. I worked at a music and mental health nonprofit for three years, and I still work as a concert photographer. And I think with talent base, I mean, not that any job doesn’t require levels of skill, but in something where you feel like you’re giving a lot of yourself and your creativity, how could bullying and those type of environments lead to feelings of inadequacy that could impact an employee even beyond if they leave that job?
Dennis Stolle/American Psychological Association (01:01:48):
Yeah. Another aspect of prevalence, kind of coming back to the lowercase C culture is that prevalence tends to be higher in organizations that are more hierarchical, either hierarchical by policy or hierarchical by culture. And so hospitals unfortunately, are a hotbed for bullying, and you’ve got very clear hierarchy. This person’s the surgeon that person’s the nurse. The nurse doesn’t tell the surgeon to, those kinds of things. I could imagine that in creative industries, there’s a, not so much a formal, but a very cultural hierarchy of, oh, you’re the person who hasn’t won any awards yet for your songs or whatever. So, and that means I’m in charge of you and I get to say whatever I want.
Anne Godlasky/NPF (01:02:49):
OK. Thank you so much.
