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The financial imperative for addressing bullying in the workplace:

In order to understand why workplace bullying is such an important issue facing organisations, one needs to consider the importance of people to organisations.    

Nearly all organisations profess the importance of people to their firms yet few really realise how important people are.

Why are people so important to an organisation now?

  • The shift from a manufacturing economy to an informatation economy with the  rapidly growing need for knowledge workers with advanced verbal, mathematical,  and social skills .Today we are manufacturing more goods than ever before in our history but with far fewer people.
  • The continuing and escalating explosion of new knowledge, new technology and new products which keeps raising the requirements of economic adaptiveness.
  • With the birth of the Information Age in 1980s, the importance of hard assets - machines, factories, and capital - declined relative to the importance of intangible assets such as brands, intellectual capital and talent. This
    highlights the importance of people. Cisco CEO John Chambers put is this way "A world-class engineer with five
    peers can out-produce 200 regular engineers."

Against a background where people assume so much importance within an  organisation, this creates a financial imperative to address any problems which could do damage to the welfare (and thus productivity) of any individual within the workplace.

What are the financial costs of bullying?
Due to the absence of clearly agreed parameters for defining what constitutes  workplace bullying, it is often difficult to be entirely clear to what extent bullying exists. It is the belief of the writer that the problem is hugely understated.

Some surveys illustrate the extent of the problem-According to UMIST the effects of workplace bullying are estimated to be  responsible for between one third and half of all stress related claims. According to a survey conducted by Personnel Today/Andrea Adams Trust  conducted in 1999- 93.1% of all Personnel practioners say that bullying is
occurring in their own organisation. 82.2% say that weakness in management is the prime reason for bullying.

How much damage can bullies do?
Within an organisation bullies can do a great deal of damage According to the psychologist, Peter Randall, by making their subordinates scared and/or intimidated, they put the victim in a self protective  frame of mind which stifles innovation and initiative. The victim's self esteem  deteriorates, their anger increases as the organisation cannot protect them and they lose a sense of enjoyment of their work and this leads to a deteriorating  work performance.

What are the other costs of bullying?
Bullying is an acutely destructive force eroding the professional lives of  men and women within the workplace. It makes their working lives miserable, leaving people full of self doubt. Every instance of bullying does not just impact the victim. It impacts the  co-workers who see instances of bullying and start to become afraid and think am I next? The victims start to erode their self esteem and become depressed and  angry. This impacts upon their home lives. spouses or partners see a decline in their partners' thirst for life and children lose their play mates.

The Andrea Adams Trust writes " Bullying at work is the precursor of  alarming and unimagined misery for its recipients and is synamous with tragic consequences. There are documented cases of major physical impairments of health
and many more cases involving nervous breakdown, psychological distress and  personality change, besides the intolerable pressure of acute financial repercussions and the total fracturing of careers. It has a devastating effect
on the bullied persons family. Divorce is common, and a loss of marital affection and diminished attention to one's children have been reported." There is thus a financial and a  moral case for the organisation to take action to erradicate
bullying from the workplace.

 

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