ABSTRACT
Why should we examine corporate culture in a book on bullying at work? In Chapter 2 we saw how targets of bullying may spend several years experiencing behaviours at a cost to themselves, often known about by others. When reading such stories in the press, a question which most of us will ask is ‘Why wasn’t it stopped earlier?’ The authors see the culture or climate as the major organisational element that allows bullying to continue by upholding norms of behaviour from an era when such behaviour at work was not questioned. In this chapter we will use a model called the ‘culture web’ to pick apart the various aspects of culture and, using examples, show how these can both support and diminish bullying at work.
