Workplace abuse is an attempt by one or more people to undermine and harm another person by threatening that person’s professional status, self-confidence, and ability to perform the job. It is intentionally hurtful, typically repeated, often malicious, and perceived by the target as a hostile act.
Whenever a person decides to harm another person, and the targeted person is unable to respond with equal force, it’s abuse. Abuse stems from an imbalance of power. The greater the power a person holds over another, the more devastating the abuse.
When a person abuses another person, it’s often driven by abusers’ needs to mask their low self-esteem and to control someone they feel is a threat — usually competent, dedicated employees. Abusers often escalate the control by roping others into their power games, denying responsibility for the abuse, and making their tactics subtle and manipulative. One common tactic is gaslighting, convincing targets they’re the problem by twisting or selectively omitting information to make targets doubt their own perception.
The entire power game works like domestic abuse, with a typical recipe:
- The abuser initially repeatedly reprimands the better than average target for trivial matters and those that would be described completely differently by the target. The abuser repeatedly puts the target down.
- The abuser convinces others that the target is incompetent, so others can begin to shun the target and unwittingly participate in the emotional abuse.
- The abuser drives the target to go to report the problem to the bully’s boss or to Human Resources and then escalates the bully behavior.
- The abuser makes their tactics so outrageous that the target’s support system (family and friends) doesn’t believe the target and can’t offer advice. Then these family and friends become tired of hearing the target obsessively repeat issues that can’t be resolved.
- The target is now very much alone and increasingly vulnerable to suicide. Targets try everything and then give up hope. If not stopped, the prolonged abuse causes depression and often suicidal thoughts. “Targets who sense that they’re about to be fired and cannot cope with that eventuality are vulnerable to suicide,” says reporter Natasha Wallace in her article “Suicide, When Related to Workplace Bullying.”
It not only damages targets, but it also undermines the organization’s goals by putting personal agendas above the organization’s and targets’ needs.
(We’re not talking about a bad day or discipline with just cause: enforcing policies and procedures, providing helpful feedback, measuring performance fairly, privately discussing fair discipline, denying requests or other discipline with just cause.)
COMMON ABUSIVE BEHAVIORS
Verbal abuse:
- Discounting and minimizing
- Name-calling, put-downs, yelling, or intimidating gestures
- Silent treatment, ignoring, or walking away from you
- Excessively harsh criticism or reprimands
- Unwillingness to engage in a dialogue
- Rumors, gossip, behind-the-back defamation, or false accusations
- Offensive language, jokes, or sarcasm
- Comments about your protected status (age, gender, religion, race, color, beliefs, for example)
- Threats
- Blaming or guilt
- Placating
- Making a joke out of your feelings
- Jumping to conclusions about what you think
- Changing the subject, not allowing you to speak, deflecting, or blaming you when you confront them
Sabotage:
Exclusion from:
- Meetings and conversations you should be involved with
- Timely access to resources and information you need to do your job
- Support, empathy, and attention (when others receive it)
- Assignment of work (followed by reprimands for not completing work)
Unfairness (also called gaslighting or crazy-making) designed to make you believe you’re the problem. The abuser twists, lies about, or selectively omits information to favor them to make you doubt your own memory, perception, and sanity.
- A demotion or other discipline, including threatening job loss, without cause
- Micromanaging
- Inconsistently complying with rules
- Discounting and denying accomplishments or taking credit for your work
- Blocking requests for training, leave, or promotion
- Increasing responsibilities without giving you authority to complete the responsibilities
- Removing responsibilities with no explanation
- Unreasonably heavy workloads, even non-related work
- Underwork resulting in you feeling useless
- Unrealistic deadlines
- Favoritism involving you having a separate set of rules or benefits or frequently changing rules
- Vague unsatisfactory work performance reviews or accusations without factual backup
- Pestering, spying, stalking, or tampering with personal belongings and equipment
Lack of clarity or vague directions and responses to take away your power, leaving you confused. It’s deception that can set you up for failure regarding:
- Work expectations (changing them without notice, explanation, or buy-in)
- Deadlines (with reprimands for missing deadlines not communicated)
- Reprimands without providing ways to improve
Mobbing:
Abuse disrupts connection. When abusers deceive others into thinking the target is the problem, they use the emotional abuse they caused to convince others that the target is mentally ill, setting the stage for mobbing, in which coworkers join in to isolate the target. Mobbing involves:
- Covert campaigns of abuse to freeze you out through rumors, gossip, and exclusion, including social events
- Inaccurate, negative performance reviews to begin a paper trail to justify the abuse as a business decision
- Ignoring your valid complaint by using a bogus complaint process to avoid liability
TARGET HARM
- Stress symptoms: anxiety, depression, digestive issues, heart disease, high blood pressure, eating problems, and loss of sleep
- Grief symptoms: feelings of shock, anger, helplessness, and isolation leading to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and suicidal thoughts
- Abuse effects: loss of confidence and loss of faith in competence
- Personal relationships damage: marriage strain and damage to relationships with friends and family who tire of listening to rehashing of the abuse
- If the target leaves, income and health insurance loss, adding to stress levels
ORGANIZATION HARM
- Lower productivity and morale
- Less opportunity
- Higher absenteeism, turnover, legal costs, workers compensation costs, and costs with recruiting, interviewing, and training new employees
It’s the equivalent of burning a big pile of money. For an employee paid $50,000 annually, the costs associated with workplace abuse could end up over $150,000 — triple of what the organization would pay without workplace abuse or investigating and addressing it.
MYTHS ABOUT WORKPLACE ABUSE
MYTH: Employees can “just leave” if they don’t like the abuse.
Some can. Others don’t have safety nets to allow them to just leave. It takes time to look for another job while targets’ health deteriorates. Targets are often left to choose between their health and a paycheck if they’re unable to find new work before they can no longer tolerate the abuse. Or they may feel demoralized after repeated abuse and start to doubt their ability to succeed at employment elsewhere. Even if a target can “just leave,” why should they have to? Why should accomplished targets have to suffer on the job and in their careers while the poor-performing manager has no accountability for abusing power?
MYTH: There are legal protections against workplace abuse in the United States.
The United States remains the last among western democracies to have no anti-abuse laws for the general workforce. If mistreated employees who’ve been subjected to abusive treatment at work cannot establish that the behavior was motivated by race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, or age, they will likely have no legal protections. Even when abuse is discriminatory, targets must prove discrimination, meaning governments don’t protect anyone else from abuse — even if there’s discrimination that can’t be proven. Retaliation for whistleblowing is also illegal. Advocates are working to make severe workplace abuse illegal regardless of protected class.