How Frequent Is Bullying at Work?

"Strike first. Strike Hard. No Mercy", so went the mantra that the bad karate teacher was imparting to his pupils before tournaments in the movie Karate Kid. In a more edulcorated form, the aggressive worker, hard on his/her interlocutors has been perceived as a positive model in the last decades. And this has unfortunately favored the growth of bullying in companies.

Aggressive behavior at work comes under the spotlight in situations of extreme gravity, while forms of behavior that seemingly have a lesser impact, but have significant medium-to-long term effects, tend to fall under the radar. In workplaces there is often a more subtle aggressiveness, which is not necessarily physical, but can be expressed by the tone of one's voice, hostile gestures, hidden threats, nasty sarcasm, which can often lead to worse acts down the road.

SDA Bocconi, thanks to a contribution by the Lombardy Region Directorate of INAIL, has conducted a study on a sample of Milanese firms to investigate how frequent and serious aggressive behavior is. The picture is not reassuring for Lombard firms. If extreme phenomena are rare, there is a high likelihood of aggressive behavior in 14% of the sample, and the percentage climbs to 68% if you consider average probability. Looking at individual industries, the highest levels of aggressiveness were found in transportation and services, i.e. where exposure to external customers is very high.

But taking a snapshot of aggressiveness in companies is not enough. It is necessary to understand its sources and effects, in order to call for pre-emptive managerial actions of containment, which can guarantee the well-being of employees and firms alike. From the point of view of organizational consequences, the research study highlights the fact that aggressiveness does not pay off. Findings from interviews with managers show that highly aggressive companies are less innovative with respect to the competition, have lower productivity and are less capable at developing the skills of their employees. In general, companies where aggressiveness reigns are 10% less performing.

Aggressiveness is a lose-lose situation, both for individuals and firms. But which are the organizational factors that breed aggressiveness? Beyond exogenous factors that are not directly controllable by firms, such as the economic crisis, there are several ones on which firms can intervene. From the point of view of the psychological climate, companies with high aggressiveness create stronger perceptions of unfairness among employees: companies with low aggressiveness levels are perceived 15% fairer than companies where hard play is the norm. Similarly, aggressive companies breed high levels of workers' cynicism (+24%) and have leaderships that are short on motivation with respect to kinder companies. If we consider HR policies, high-aggressiveness companies have a lower level of employee involvement and listen to their employees less frequently (-8%). By the same token, personnel selection and career policies that are not transparent favor the emergence of aggressive behavior: in companies with high aggressiveness, employees perceive lack of transparency and cronyism 20% more often than otherwise.

The data give us both bad and good news. The bad news is that companies at risk of bullying are not a negligible proportion. The good news is that that you can pre-empt psychological harassment at work by acting on HR practices, which should be geared to facilitate the emergence of a climate of trust and a working environment from which fear is absent. For the benefit of workers and companies alike.