ABSTRACT
There is a significant amount of evidence that workplace bullies do share personality traits that single them out from non-bullying colleagues and their targets. For example, one research study which made use of grounded theory to explore the subjective impressions of employees on the experience of workplace bullying found that even non-victims perceived them to be loud and to have an overpowering manner which went with a perceived need for power and authority (Mehta, 2000). This resonates with findings from other rather different studies (e.g. Olweus, 1993; Randall, 1997a; Rayner, 1997). Crawford (1992) and Randall (1996), using clinical narrative material, find bullies to have unresolved childhood conflicts, and Weisfeld (1994) describes the high dominance motivation of bullies. In addition, young bullies in the making are unique in that frequently they ignore the submissive behaviour of their victims and carry on inflicting pain (Dodge, Price, Coie and Christopoulus, 1990).
