Workplace bullying is a phenomenon commonly-experienced worldwide. It is devastating, both to individual employees and to their workplace organizations. Occurring with increasing frequency over the past 25 years (Sedivy-Benton et al., 2015), workplace bullying has demanded mounting attention across a broad and international, multidisciplinary literature, as recent, systematic reviews attest. Sometimes blatant and sometimes incredibly subtle in its appearance, workplace bullying exacts an interpersonal and an organizational price (Nielsen & Einarsen, 2012).
On the surface, workplace bullying involves people treating each other badly. More acutely, workplace bullying reflects an imbalance of power (Bartlett & Bartlett, 2011) effected to elevate the bully’s status relative to an intended target. When, in response to a bully’s workplace affronts, a target experiences a sense of loss or humiliation (Dzurec, Kennison, & Albataineh, 2014; Fernández, 2018), he or she becomes a victim, caught up in a tense, uncomfortable, and very public relationship with the bully. A cycle of dysfunction is established organization-wide, as those beyond the bully/victim dyad find themselves inexplicably caught up in the “out-of-control dynamics” (Cilliers, 2012, p. 3) manifested in the complex relationship of bully and victim. Together, bully, victim, and bystanders engage in a compelling ‘psychological contract’ (Adams & Bray, 1992; Salin &Notelaers, 2017) that serves to perpetuate bullying’s influence across the organization.
If relational commitment was the end of the story, the efforts entailed in studying workplace bullying would be insignificant. Unfortunately, the story does not end there. Rather, the incidence of long-term and problematic workplace bullying sequelae—including a wide range of physical and emotional symptoms for individuals; significant dysfunction for organizations; and untoward outcomes for organization customers and end-users—follow in the wake of workplace bullying (Hauge, Skogstad, & Einarsen, 2010; Ikal & Sia, 2017). Whether its behaviors are blatant or subtle, “bullying at work is claimed to be a more crippling and devastating problem for employees than all other work-related stress put together” (Einarsen, 1999, p. 16), a notion reiterated by Hauge and colleagues (2017) 20 years after Einarsen’s initial, 1999 observation. Where bullying is not addressed, a culture of employee abuse (Pilch & Turska, 2014) becomes normative and expected, as navigating the workplace context increasingly requires the kinds of aggressive tactics that bullying establishes and then responsively demands from employees. This presentation overviews one particular mechanism that may be driving bullies’ enduring and destructive influence in organizations: their use of bi-strategic control tactics (Hawley, 2003; Shorey & Dzurec, 2016).
Methods:
This study was conducted via open coding analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 2012), a qualitative approach that supports investigators in painting a descriptive picture of a phenomenon. The steps of the analysis are conceptualization (selecting data), labeling, (establishing thematic comparisons) and classification (linking behaviors across settings thematically). These steps were applied to analysis of published depictions of bullies’ bi-strategic control, that is, of bullies’ simultaneous use of both strongly prosocial and subtly aggressive behaviors to yield a comprehensive picture of the ways bullies can use bi-strategic control to establish and maintain their ersatz power in workplace settings.
Results:
Through the steps of the open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 2012) analysis process—conceptualization, labeling and classification—results demonstrated that as bullies engage simultaneously in social and aggressive actions in order to secure control in their employing organizations, they are able to command “a great deal of attention from the group” (Hawley, 2003, p. 283).
Conclusions:
Along with mechanisms such as strong narrative agency and astute recognition of those who feel inherently disempowered, bullies may use bi-strategic control to establish and maintain their power in places of work, internationally. By attending to the dynamic mechanisms by which bullies exert control, rather than focusing on the discomfort of bullies’ observable behavior, those in the workplace might be better able to address and stop workplace bullying, before it imposes significant damage on workplace functioning.