Psychological abuse at work ruins lives. It’s a misuse of power and control that violates workers’ right to psychological safety.

Workplace bullying and mobbing are forms of psychological abuse,  interpersonal perpetration that violate an employee’s inherent basic human right to dignity: severe or pervasive infliction of hostile and unethical words and/or actions, intentional or unintentional, direct or indirect, or omissions, directed in a targeted and/or systematic manner that creates a toxic work environment that is offensive, and a reasonable person would find unsuitable to perform regular duties and tasks. A single severe incident of such behavior may also constitute psychological abuse.

Workplace psychological abuse is an issue of employee exploitation. Employers are not explicitly liable for the psychological safety of their employees — nor do they want to be. At its root cause is avoidance of employer liability. Employers are negatively incentivized to address it. 

Workplace psychological abuse is highly affiliated with physical and/or mental health injuries. It is 4x more prevalent than sexual harassment alone. The phenomenon has been dubbed a silent epidemic and is a public health threat affecting over 60 million employees in the United States in 2017 (the equivalent of the entire population of Italy).

Abuse of power is often a symptom of implicit bias — a problem anti-discrimination law stopped helping since the ‘90s when courts moved from focusing on impact to intent. Intent is a high threshold that makes the law an epic failure when it comes to disrupting hierarchies at work around demographics.

HOW IT WORKS

Workplace bullying typically begins when one employee, who is generally insecure and/or jealous, is threatened by the competence or demeanor of another employee. The bully targets an unsuspecting employee to minimize and/or eliminate the perceived threat the employee poses to them. Bullies use persistent psychological abuse to control the narrative. They try to convince the employee they are incompetent. They try to convince others the employee is incompetent. Common tactics include:

False accusations, including bogus reviews
Ignoring or excluding someone
Career sabotage, including removal of responsibilities

In toxic work environments, when employees report psychologically abusive behavior to proper workplace authorities, those authorities ignore their complaints. Employers are not liable for psychologically abusive behavior, nor do many want to be. In toxic work environments, the employer, its representative employees mislead the unsuspecting employee to believe they have a legitimate complaint process to remedy the problem.

The employer fails to alter the employee’s unsafe work environment. The employer doesn’t remove the stressor. The emboldened bully continues to abuse the target without consequence or deterrent. The complaint process is unnecessarily prolonged.

The unsuspecting employee voluntarily leaves, dies, or is fired, succumbing to the silent killer stress of the work environment. There is significant physical, mental, and emotional injury as well as severe economic harm. Game over. The bully wins. Her perceived competition is gone. The employer wins. Their perceived threat of liability is gone. The unsuspecting employee had done nothing to provoke either.

Trauma upon trauma. When the employee realizes the institutional duplicity and complicity of tampering with their health and livelihood, forcing them off the payroll to avoid liability, trauma upon trauma occurs.

Upon trauma. The employee further realizes there is no legal recourse for any of it.

Who’s picking up the tab for the long-term health care of millions of unemployed citizens and basic needs costs? You are: the taxpayer. And you have been for decades.

HUMAN COSTS
Psychological distress (anxiety, depression, burnout)
Physiological outcome (heart disease, obesity, sleep problems, cancer, PTSD, suicidal thoughts, suicide)
Job and/or career loss and other financial harm

ORGANIZATION COSTS
Higher absenteeism, turnover, training costs, and employee benefits costs
Lower task performance, productivity, and morale