Chapter 2: Recognizing and Responding to Workplace Bullying and Mobbing: Guidelines for Business Leaders

The workplace is all about relationships. These relationships include those between supervisors and subordinates, coworkers with each other, and workers with customers and people served. Work relationships also include the relationship between a particular worker and the tasks and actions that need to be accomplished in order to fulfill the mission of the organization, however large or small that mission may be. Organizational leaders set the tone in their organizations, for good or for bad, and their attitudes and actions will either foster or discourage workplace bullying and mobbing.

There is a strong ethical case and a strong business case to be made for building workplaces around the core value of respect for the dignity of each and every worker. In this chapter, why leaders should pay attention to both the ethical and business cases for preventing workplace bullying and mobbing will be discussed. The following key sets of information will be reviewed: (a) what workplace bullying and mobbing are and are not; (b) the devastating effects of bullying and mobbing both on individual workers and on their organizations; and (c) strategies leaders can take to prevent bullying and mobbing.