Workplace Bullying

What is Workplace Bullying?

Workplace bullying involves the repetitive, prolonged abuse of power. Unwelcome, unreasonable, escalating behaviours are aggressively directed at one or more workers and cause humiliation, offence, intimidation and distress. It places an employee or a group of employee’s health, well-being, safety and career at risk, interferes with job performance and creates a toxic working environment. Workplace bullying can attack anyone, in any career, at any level, within any organisation, at any time.

Two people at a workplace gossiping about a woman indicating workplace bullying | Psychologists Gold Coast are here to help you | Alegna Solutions

Types Of Bullying Behaviours:

  1. Work related
  2. Personal attacks
  3. Social isolation
  4. Verbal threats
  5. Spreading rumours

Don’t suffer Workplace Bullying in silence

Bullying can be :

  • Aggressive: Screaming, blaming, physically threatening. It is easily noticed.
  • Passive: Subtle, camouflaged, hard to identify, divisive, undermining, sabotaging, malicious. Targets don’t always know where it is coming from and who is doing it.

Bullying behaviours can be:

  • Verbal abuse (being put down or ridiculed)
  • Making fun of you or your work (including your family, sex, sexuality, race or culture, education or economic background)
  • Excluding or isolating you from people or situations
  • Intimidation (making you feel afraid or fearful to go about your work as normal)
  • Giving you pointless jobs that have nothing to do with your job
  • Deliberately holding back information you need for getting your work done properly
  • Teasing or regularly making someone the brunt of practical jokes
  • Displaying material that is degrading or offensive
  • Spreading gossip, rumours and innuendo of a malicious nature

Whilst there are a variety of reasons why a person may bully another person in the workplace, bullying behaviours are not acceptable and need to be acted upon. It can impact not only those employees directly exposed but others around them such as family, co-workers and friends.

Reactions of individual employees varies, and can include:

  • Feeling scared, stressed, anxious or depressed
  • Having less confidence and self belief
  • Having your life outside of work affected, e.g. study, relationships
  • Feeling unable to trust your employer or the people with whom you work
  • Having physical symptoms of stress such as headaches or sleep problems
  • Being absent more from work
  • Panic attacks or impaired ability to make decisions
  • Incapacity to work, concentration problems
  • Reduced output and performance
  • Depression or a sense of isolation
  • Physical injury

How we can help?

Alegna Solutions psychologists are specialised in this area and will help you find ways to address and resolve workplace bullying. We can assist you to develop an action plan to ensure it ceases and to have the opportunity to recover from the experience in order to move forward.

Don’t suffer workplace bullying in silence. Call us now for a confidential appointment.