ABSTRACT
During the last 10 years, a wide range of studies have documented the existence of bullying as a salient problem in contemporary working life (Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf and Cooper, 2003). This problem, which has also been labelled ‘emotional abuse’, ‘harassment at work’ or ‘victimization at work’, seems to affect as many as 5–10 per cent of the workforce at any point in time (Zapf, Einarsen, Hoel and Vartia 2003). Studies have also shown that exposure to bullying leads to a host of negative effects in targets (Einarsen and Mikkelsen 2003) as well as having detrimental effects on the organization and its working environment (Hoel, Einarsen and Cooper 2003). Exposure to such treatment has been claimed to be a more crippling and devastating problem for employees than all other kinds of work-related stress put together, and is seen by many researchers and targets alike as an extreme type of social stress at work (Zapf, Knorz and Kulla 1996). Although the phenomenon is likely to be as old as mankind, public awareness on the issue of bullying at work among adults was first raised in the Nordic countries in the late 1980s (Leymann 1990; Matthiesen, Raknes and R⊘kkum 1989). During the 1990s interest also spread to countries such as the UK (Adams 1992; Rayner 1997), Australia (McCarthy, Sheehan and Wilkie, 1996), Germany and Austria (Neidl 1995; Zapf, Knorz and Kulla 1996). The systematic mistreatment of employees by colleagues and superiors has however only recently been in focus in the US (Rayner and Keashly 2004), although the issue was raised as early as 1976 in the book The harassed worker by Carroll Brodsky. The aim of the present chapter is to provide an overview of research results relating to the very nature and causes of bullying at work. After focusing on the key characteristics of the phenomenon, we discuss two different but not necessarily mutually exclusive rationales as to why bullying occurs within the work environment; the role of individuals and the role of the organization.
