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What is Workplace Mobbing?

"Nothing can prepare you for living or working with a sociopathic serial bully. It is the most devastating, draining, misunderstood, and ultimately futile experience imaginable."

~ Tim Field

In the early 1980s, a Swedish psychologist named Heinz Leymann* identified a grave threat to health and safety in what appear to be the healthiest, safest workplaces in the world. German was Leymann’s first language, Swedish his second, but he labeled the distinct menace he had found with an English word: mobbing. ...

Mobbing can be understood as the stressor to beat all stressors. It is an impassioned, collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted worker. Initiated most often by a person in a position of power or influence, mobbing is a desperate urge to crush and eliminate the target. The urge travels through the workplace like a virus, infecting one person after another. The target comes to be viewed as absolutely abhorrent, with no redeeming qualities, outside the circle of acceptance and respectability, deserving only of contempt. As the campaign proceeds, a steadily larger range of hostile ploys and communications comes to be seen as legitimate.

Mobbing is hardly the only source of debilitating stress at work, and it was not the only one on which Leymann did research. He interviewed bank employees who had undergone the terror of armed robbery, and subway drivers who had watched helplessly as their trains ran over persons who fell or jumped onto the tracks. Leymann documented the depression, absenteeism, sleeplessness, and other symptoms of trauma resulting from such stressful experiences.

Bank robberies and subway suicides were no match, however, for being mobbed by co-workers in the personal devastation that ensued. Not infrequently, mobbing spelled the end of the target’s career, marriage, health, and livelihood. From a study of circumstances surrounding suicides in Sweden, Leymann estimated that about twelve percent of people who take their own lives have recently been mobbed at work.
~ Professor Kenneth Westhues, University of Waterloo
(Exerpts from 'At the Mercy of the Mob: A Summary of Research on Workplace Mobbing')

* Professor Heinz Leymann, PhD, MD sci
   For more information see The Mobbing Encyclopaedia

>>> FAQ: What does the word "mobbing" mean?

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How Serious are Psychological Problems after Mobbing?
© Heinz Leymann - file 32100e - The Mobbing Encyclopaedia

... The mobbed employee who has become our patient suffers from a traumatic environment: psychiatric, social insurance office, personnel department, managers, co-workers, labor unions, doctors in general practice, company health care, etc., can, if events progress unfavorably, produce worse and worse traumata.

Thus, our patients, like raped women, find themselves under a continuing threat. As long as the perpetrator is free, the woman can be attacked again. As long as the mobbed individual does not receive effective support, he or she can be torn to pieces again at any time.

...The unwieldy social situation for these individuals consists not only of severe psychological trauma but of an extremely prolonged stress condition that seriously threatens the individual's socio-economic existence. Torn out of their social network, the majority of mobbing victims face the threat of early retirement, with permanent psychological damage.

>>> FULL ARTICLE on 'Health Issues' page

Why should you be concerned
about mobbing?

If you are an employer
mobbing poses a danger to your best people,
to your productivity, to your profitability
and your reputation.

If you are an employee
mobbing poses a danger to your mental
health, to your physical health, to your career
and even your life.

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The following notice regarding Ban Bullying at Work Day (Nov. 7) is from Just Fight On!

Nov.7 is Ban Bullying at Work Day
(but with enough support maybe we can make everyday Ban Bullying at Work Day)

We hope you have a good time at work but please spare a thought for those won't. We ask that you think about the 1 in 5 staff who have been bullied in the last two years.

So what will you be doing today?

• Will you be belittled, shouted at, harassed, have your work and responsibilities taken away, threatened, intimidated, made fun of...and do you know what you are going through is bullying...and what to do about it?
   
• Will you see someone suffer from bullying, harassment, intimidation or discrimination...and will you say anything?
   
• Are you a manager who knows that someone is quiet, tearful and very clearly unhappy at work, maybe they have made complaints in the past but nothing has been done...and will you talk to them, HEAR them and take what they say seriously...and will YOU do something to help them?
   
• Will you be working in HR and get a complaint from someone who is alleging some form of abuse...and will you take it seriously, will you investigate it properly...or will you just take the alleged bullies word for it when the standard denial comes...and sweep it under the carpet...and do you know what damage that does?
   
• Are you a GP who is seeing a patient for the Nth time this year with yet another complaint...and will you ask about their work situation and maybe establish the cause of their various health problems?
   
• Or will you be going into work relishing the thought of hurting someone, taking pleasure from their pain, laughing at their distress...and will Ban Bullying Day be the day you finally get caught?

What ever you do today, think about workplace bullying, the damage it causes and how it can devastate lives.

Just Fight On! run the Centre Against Workplace Bullying,
the UK's only anti-bullying centre for workers.

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The world is a dangerous place,
not because of those who do evil,
but because of those who look on and do nothing.

~ Albert Einstein