Official Full-Text Paper (PDF): Is Your Organization a Great Place for Bullies to Work? ... lying bosses launch campaigns against perfectly. competent employees who .... However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
2009
Research Briefs
Another interesting finding of this research is that the majority of employees tried to defuse the discomfort created by the uncivil situations passively, by conflict avoidance or minimization. Most victims of uncivil behavior avoided directly confronting the instigator. And many employees used the coping strategy of minimization. In other words, they coped with the stressful emotions resulting from incivility by convincing themselves that what happened was no big deal and that nothing needed to be done about it. Perhaps the most surprising finding of Cortina and Magley’s study is how rarely employees who experienced workplace incivility lodged complaints with organizational officials. As a matter of fact, only 1% to 6% of employees who experienced incivility had ever filed a formal complaint. Instead, employees needing support were more likely to turn to their informal social networks (e.g., friends and peers) rather than superiors or human resource managers to discuss their feelings about incivility. Cortina and Magley discovered that the power dynamics between the employee and the instigator is critical in terms of how people respond to incivility. For example, if the employees experiencing incivility had power over the instigator, they often reacted in a detached, nonemotional manner. And superiors who responded to subordinates displaying incivility tended to do so in a direct manner. Conversely, victims of incivility with less power than the instigator usually dealt with it by avoiding the instigator for as long as possible. Cortina and Magley found that these individuals were unlikely to confront their rude superiors unless the incivility became frequent, making avoidance impractical. The implications of this research are compelling. Typically, incivility needs to escalate over time to more severe behavior (e.g., bullying) before employees are likely to report it to management. Consequently, organizational leaders are not likely to know that employees are experiencing any distress until after damage to employees’ well-being has already occurred. As a result, Cortina and Magley advise organizational leaders not to wait for formal grievances before taking action to combat workplace incivility. Instead, proactive
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leaders could benefit their organizations by putting mechanisms in place aimed at preventing uncivil conduct in the workplace (e.g., training programs or codes of conduct). In addition, organizational leaders need to direct employees to resources that can provide assistance on how to cope with incivility (e.g., employee assistance programs or mentors). Employees who minimize or ignore the uncivil conduct of their colleagues or supervisors may have found a way to cope with their stress, at least in the short run. But organizational leaders who ignore or minimize the seriousness of workplace incivility do so at their peril. Over the long haul, organizations that fail to be proactive in managing incivility will likely face more serious and corrosive consequences that eat away at workplace culture. And unfortunately, those preventable consequences—such as lower employee job satisfaction and performance—may prove expensive indeed. Source: Cortina, L. M., & Magley, V. J. (2009). Patterns and profiles of responses to incivility in the workplace. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 14(3), 272–288.
Is Your Organization a Great Place for Bullies to Work? Research Brief by Stuart D. Sidle, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of New Haven
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uch has been written in recent years about the psychological despair suffered by employees who are bullied by their supervisors. And considering the evidence about the prevalence of bullying and its devastating impact, why haven’t organizational leaders been able to eradicate this form of worker mistreatment? Perhaps part of the answer is that businesses take too much of a BandAid approach, reacting to specific incidents of bullying instead of having a systemic program in place that gets at the root of the problem.
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Academy of Management Perspectives
Yet companies can be forgiven for being limited in their responses to workplace bullying since research on the topic has generally ignored the organizational dynamics that increase or decrease the likelihood of supervisory bullying. Instead, most research on workplace bullying has focused on the personality of the bully and on the emotional damage done to employees. As a result, it is hard to address supervisory bullying without an understanding of what organizational factors contribute to it. Fortunately, new research sheds light on the organizational circumstances that foster an environment ripe for the emergence of supervisory bullies. Like bullies on a school playground, these bosses use both subtle and not so subtle tactics of abuse to intimidate and humiliate their subordinates. Indeed, Vincent J. Roscigno, Steven H. Lopez, and Randy Hodson of Ohio State University examined whether specific workplace dynamics make some organizations more prone to supervisory bullying than others. Specifically, they searched for commonalities in environments that tend to have supervisory bullying by studying 204 organizational ethnographies—published narratives of field studies in which sociologists observe behavior in actual workplaces. Roscigno and his colleagues assessed these narratives using a criminal justice framework known as the “routine activities model.” This model argues that crimes occur when there are motivated perpetrators, suitable targets, and the absence of guardians—people who would stop crimes from occurring. Consequently, Roscigno and his colleagues examined the dynamics of the relationships between the supervisory bullies (perpetrators) and the workers who were bullied (targets) in the narratives at their disposal. They also examined whether capable guardians, such as strong unions, effective policies, or attentive managers, were present to stop the victims from being bullied. Finally, they measured the prevalence of bullying and attributes of the victims, perpetrators, and guardians. Among the most compelling results of the study are those that shed light on who is most vulnerable to supervisory bullying. Clearly, the most likely victims of supervisory bullying are
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those with much less power, which can be affected by both social and positional status differences. In short, women and minority workers tended be the most vulnerable to supervisory bullying, especially when employed in personal service roles. As a matter of fact, more than half of all cases of bullying discovered in the ethnographic narratives involved employees in personal service roles such as housekeepers, nannies, or office assistants (and many of the individuals in these roles were women and minorities). Moreover, employees who lacked job security were also vulnerable targets for supervisory bullies. Naturally, the fear of job loss could make employees feel powerless while being intimidated, humiliated, and threatened by a supervisor. Incidentally, in times of downsizing where job security is at risk, bullying is likely to become more prevalent, even among highly paid employees. As a matter of fact, Roscigno and his colleagues found that supervisory bullying aimed at such well-paid workers was relatively frequent, especially in highly competitive, pressure-cooker work environments. Another interesting finding was that supervisors inclined toward bullying behavior are most likely to lash out at their subordinate victims when operating in highly chaotic and disorganized workplaces. In these workplaces— characterized by poor planning and incompetent management—supervisors are motivated to blame failures and mistakes on their powerless subordinates. And in the absence of effective processes and procedures, supervisors may feel that intimidating and abusing subordinates are reasonable ways to get desired results. In other words, if useful procedures for managing employee performance are absent or confusing, yelling and swearing at subordinates may seem like a logical choice for many supervisors. On the other hand, it’s clear that many supervisory bullies do not threaten and humiliate for the benefit of getting work done. Instead, these bullying bosses launch campaigns against perfectly competent employees who, for some reason, are seen as threats. Strange as it may seem, in some cases it appears that bosses bully their subordinates because they take pleasure in it (e.g., they feel
2009
Research Briefs
validated by demonstrating their superiority). Indeed, chaotic and ambiguous environments are the perfect workplaces for bullies to act against their targeted victims. Clearly, the prevalence of bullying has inspired some industry leaders and employee rights advocates to consider doing more to protect workers from abusive supervisors. Surprisingly, Roscigno and his colleagues found that most of the guardians in place to protect workers from bullying are not fully capable of stopping the perpetrators. For example, while some organizations in the study had strong unions in place that could confront management about employee mistreatment, they still experienced incidents of supervisory bullying. Ironically, strong unions tend to develop in organizational cultures where bullying has been prevalent for a long time. Consequently, while such unions are important and sometimes helpful, they may be no match for a culture of abuse that has become deeply embedded in the organization. In other words, chaotic, poorly structured organizations tend to become breeding grounds for bullies, regardless of whether a union is present or not. In light of these findings, what can organizational leaders do proactively to prevent bullying from happening in the first place, instead of merely reacting to it after the fact? Clearly, without effective constraints, supervisors with a tendency toward bullying will continue to kick sand in the faces of their victims because their abusive tactics appear to work— either in terms of shaping employee behavior or simply by making bullies feel superior. Consequently, the challenge for organizations is to develop more capable guardians, to institute clear policies against bullying, and to ensure that effective grievance channels are in place. These steps may help dissuade supervisors from bullying their subordinates or, at the very least, give employees a mechanism for redress when they are victims of abuse.
Source: Roscigno, V. J., Lopez, S. H., & Hodson, R. (2009). Supervisory bullying, status inequalities and organizational context. Social Forces, 87(3), 1561–1589.
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Loan Hurdles: Do Banks Discriminate Against Women Entrepreneurs? Research Brief by Rose M. Prasad, Department of Finance, Central Michigan University
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anks, small and large, are financial intermediaries. As they went through the natural process of expansion and emerged as players in the modern financial framework, banks grew in number. In other words, millions of depositors put money into thousands of banks—large, midsize, and small—with their managerial behavior constrained by prudent regulations. Regulations notwithstanding, an ongoing issue of concern is whether banks behave too liberally with some groups of clients and too conservatively with others. For instance, one particularly interesting question along these lines is whether banks use different criteria in deciding whether or not to lend money to start-up firms founded by women entrepreneurs. A recent study by Alexander Muravyev (St. Petersburg University), Oleksander Talavera (Robert Gordon University), and Dorothea Schafer (Free University of Berlin) addressed this question by focusing on banks in both developing and developed markets. One philosophy in banking is that banks should not grant credit to people who need it, but instead lend only to those who can pay back the loan, on time and with interest. Another notion is that bank managers tend to lend money to those like themselves, and since most bankers are men, gender discrimination may exist. Some years ago, to combat this perceived discrimination, Pacific Women’s Bank was founded by women for women. Unfortunately, the bank failed. Nevertheless, previous studies have found some evidence of gender discrimination in banks’ loan decisions. That said, one problem in such studies is that some of the financial factors examined co-vary with gender to some extent. For example, most women-owned businesses start with lower levels of overall capitalization than their maleowned counterparts— differences that may explain lower rates of loans. But does this really
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