Conflicts and Bullying
It’s normal to have conflicts inside the workplace.
In a place where professionals are gathered and everyone has their own personalities, conflicts are bound to happen. Some are healthy and some are not.
Bullying in the workplace is a pressing matter. The burden of dealing with regular abuse on top of grinding for your career can be a lot to handle.
These incidents are unhealthy and damaging, not only to the subjects of aggression themselves but to the whole organization.
Organizational Conflicts That Can Cause Bullying
Discrimination. Age, sex, religion, color, are among the qualities that cause conflict in the workplace. A person or a group of people having prejudice on a co-worker is one of the common causes of discriminatory behavior.
Offensive jokes, physical attacks and ostracization are the common ways bullies employ to agonize their victims.
Work Mistakes. Friction arising from simple mistakes can cause repeated ill-treatment.
In a work environment where your jobs can directly or indirectly affect another, your mistakes can be seen as an unnecessary bother.
As petty as it sounds, if you cause such inconvenience for them, they can bully you as reparations.
Different Work Styles and Values. Having different personalities in the workplace is vital to maintain a healthy environment where people can grow. Clashing due to these differences happens all the time.
What causes trouble is when the differences result in a deep feeling of hatred. While wanting to assert a position, intention is sometimes misplaced and transforms to regular offensive behavior.
Departmental Conflicts. Bullies feel stronger in a group. Tension between departments can make a probable excuse to attack a person not belonging to the same team.
New Hires. Whether the new hire is a superior or an entry level employee, having someone join an already established organization can cause changes in power dynamics.
These changes cause aggressive tendencies for people looking to protect their position and those wanting to push it.
Changes in the Organization. This conflict does not happen between people but is caused by changes within the company itself
Examples would be mergers, lay-offs, budget cuts and performance based evaluations. These changes might sound unrelated but studies show that organizational changes indirectly affects the chances of bullying cases.
When such changes arise, stressors increase. Change in the workplace often gives a negative connotation to people so they react and act more negatively than normal.
Reach Out
If you experience bullying in the workplace, you may choose to handle it yourself or report it, depending on which you’re most comfortable with.
Regardless of your chosen plan of action, you should also find a trusted person. It can be a friend or family member whom you can confide with. Having someone to talk to can lessen the mental and emotional stress you are going through.
There are also services that are found online that can help you cope up with the situation. Everyday Empathy in Hong Kong, for example, has teams of competent therapists ready to sit with you. They offer individual counselling assessments to make sure your issues are resolved by the roots.
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