Development of Bullying at the Workplace - Essay Example

Final Draft Essay on the development of bullying at the workplace Workplace bullying has changed overtime to what it is today. In the recent past, few people would have believed of the existence of bullying among adults. The main assumption was that only children and students who engaged in these acts. However, with the increased reports of negative acts by employees in organizations by their fellows raised more concerns; bullying among adults at the workplace was real. It was however hard to believe this reality. Increasingly, more people and especially women reported to have had received negative acts from their fellows in the workplace. This necessitated the need for research on bullying at the workplace. This essay will consider the changes that have taken place in bullying at the workplace. Further, it will discuss factors that contributed to these changes and the extent to which employees practice bullying among them in the organization. According to Rayner (200), in the mid-1990s, little research focused on bullying in the work place. Most of the researches conducted focused on bullying among the children and students in schools and playing grounds. Perhaps, because of the belief that adults were too busy to start any form of aggressions against each other must have contributed to the ignorance. With time however, the increased cases of bullying among employees in various organizations made it necessary to conduct research on bullying in the workplace (Rayner 200). With the little attention paid to the extent of bullying in the organizations, there was no legislative framework put in place focusing on workplace bullying. If anything, researchers relied on accounts of victims of bullying to define what constituted bullying (Rayner 201). There was in fact little research focusing on bullying in the workplace. With this understanding, most of the researchers focused on the ways in which children bullied each other in the playground. As researchers focused on personalized accounts of women who ever received any form of negative treatment in the organization from their male counterparts, most of these researchers found a connection between gender and work place bullying. Essentially, this equated bullying to a form of sexual harassment in the organization, than what it currently is. Although there is some truth in this, sexual harassment, as subsequent researchers established is just an example of a form of organizational bullying. Women, regarded as the naturally weaker gender than men in the society are victims of various social problems affecting people in the society. Research in the mid-1990s focused on the level of sexual harassment in the organizations. Various accounts of junior female workers being prey of their male bosses became the major concern for most organizations and executives (Rayner 203). The implications of this is that few people paid attention to the increasing need to consider other forms of acts that constituted bullying at the workplace. As more people paid attention to sexual harassment in the organization, other forms of negative acts thrived as well (Rayner 203). Verbal and non-verbal acts thrived among the employees, yet these did not catch the attention of the researchers. With time however, through women empowerment, the early and mid-2000 years saw an increase in the number of women taking up managerial positions in organizations. Various recommendations in the past saw this as one of the best ways of curbing bullying in the organization. The inability of these researchers to find a comprehensive definition of what constituted bullying was one of the main reasons for this development. However, there was no legislation put in place then, which fully addressed the issue of bullying in the workplace. As such, the researchers limited their scope of study to negative acts against fellow employees. The danger of this is that it drew researchers’ attention to sexual harassment. When more women took managerial position, the assumption was that this would automatically curb the problem. However, cases of bullying increased in the organizations. Focusing on women left men out the research, yet they too faced the same problem. Theirs’ however did not relate to sexually, but constituted verbal and non-verbal modes of communication in the organization (Rayner 205). The dynamism with which organizations transformed in the last decade saw a change in the acts of bullying in the organizations. Taking different forms and aspects, these acts became subject to legislation. While legislation outlawed any form of sexual harassment in the organizations, people kept complaining of various negative acts perpetrated to them by others. This necessitated the formulation of laws seeking to protect the people from such acts. Additionally, the legislation provided a definition of what constituted bullying in the organizing. Although there was no exact definition of bullying in the workplace, the definition included all forms of negative acts that employees extended to their fellows in the workplace. The advent of information technology and the increased level of uptake of ICT by organizations changed the paradigm of bullying in the organizations (Privitera and Marilyn 396). Cyberbullying became a common occurrence in the organizations. With most members of organizations using emails, telephones and social media as modes of communication, this created a good avenue for bullying (Privitera and Marilyn 396). There is an increase in the level of cyberbullying in organizations, if the recent reports are anything to go by. Researchers agree that it is difficult to fight this form of bullying in organizations. The fact that it is difficult to keep track of these activities online makes it a rather complex undertaking. Rumours, gossip, and other kinds of inflammatory messages exchanged on the online platform are on the rise (Privitera and Marilyn 397). Spreading malicious rumours about an individual in the organization, intimidation, physical exclusion, or isolation of an individual in the workplace, removing a person from their areas of operations and their responsibilities without any reason and yelling at others constituted bullying. Currently, there is an increase in the amount information such as rumours conveyed through the internet and other technological gadgets and this constitute bullying. Others included intrusion to the privacy of a person, negative criticism of a person in the organization, withholding necessary information from an individual, assigning unreasonable duties to employees, belittling a person’s opinions among others. Works Cited Privitera, Carmel, and Marilyn Anne Campbell. "Cyberbullying: The New Face Of Workplace Bullying?." Cyberpsychology & Behavior12.4 (2009): 395-400. Academic Search Premier. Web. 26 Jan. 2014. Rayner, Charlotte. "The Incidence Of Workplace Bullying." Journal Of Community & Applied Social Psychology 7.3 (1997): 199-208.Academic Search Premier. Web. 26 Jan. 2014. Read More