Workplace Bullying In The Workplace

BULLYING In the 1980s when Heinz Leymann, a Swedish psychologist, used the term ‘mobbing’ to describe the aggressive act to the employees at work. Leyman expressed the term as a result of a group workers aggressive act against a single co-wroker (Leymann, 1986). Later on, in the early 1990, the term ‘workplace bullying’ was introduced to the public by Andrea Adams, who was a British journalist. There are also several terminologies used to refer to aggression in the form of bullying: harassment (Brodsky, 1976), mobbing or psychological (Leymann, 1990), workplace trauma (Wilson, 1991), emotional abuse (Lutgen-sandvik, 2003) etc. Different researchers define bullying differently. Namie & Namie (2003, p. 3) have defined bullying as the “repeated, malicious, health endangering mistreatment of one employee by one or more employees”. Einarsen et al. (2011) defined workplace bullying as “harassing, offending, or socially excluding someone or negatively affecting someone’s work” (p. 22). James (1997) asserts that workplace bullying is an abuse of coercive power by either individuals in the internal workplace or external clients

Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf & Cooper (2003, p15) “Bullying at work means harassing, offending, socially excluding someone or negatively affecting someone’s work tasks. In order for the label bullying (or mobbing) to be applied to a particular activity, interaction or process, it has to occur repeatedly and regularly (e.g., weekly) and over a period of time (e.g.