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

~ Albert Einstein