A lit match in a hayfield

By Gregory Teachout

Marilyn Noble knew she had named the problem correctly when she started getting stopped in the supermarket. She would be, say, hefting a pineapple when someone would sidle up and start talking to her about being abused at work. 

Years before, Noble, an Adult Educator and Community Development Practitioner who operated her own practice in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, had been involved in bullying reduction work with youth. She had also been a victim of workplace bullying in the past. After talking with an academic colleague who was also on the receiving end of a cruel dynamic at work, the two created a plan for formal research to address what they had endured. 

While the term “workplace bullying” already existed in psychological literature, Noble and her colleague Dr. Judith MacIntosh brought it to the public’s attention. What began as a local phenomenon quickly swept through Canadian media. 

“It became a very public issue,” says Noble. “I compared it at the time to the way the term ‘family violence’ ascended twenty years before. We had named something and brought it out into the daylight and made it OK to talk about.”

That’s when people started approaching Noble in the produce section to share their pain and gratitude. 

“As soon as word went out that we were doing this kind of research, and we did have to advertise publicly to get participants, suddenly, there was a media firestorm,” says Noble. “It was like we had dropped a lit match in a dry hayfield. I did over 40 media interviews in that period, from one end of Canada to the other, and some in the United States. This was a really hot topic that hadn’t been discussed..”

“It seemed there was a pent-up need to speak about this,” says MacIntosh, a Professor Emerita, Faculty of Nursing, at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. “Media attention mushroomed and we were inundated with interview requests.”  

In order to combat what was clearly a widespread problem, the team would need to become taxonomists — defining what constitutes workplace bullying and examining its variants. 

“Trying to describe workplace bullying was a bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall,” says Noble. “There were so many forms it could take, and so many ways people had experienced it.” 

Coping strategies 

After Noble and MacIntosh completed the interview phase of their project, they turned their attention to how people cope with workplace bullying. They found that prevailing attitudes and the problem’s lack of institutional visibility — not to mention the absence of official support structures, in many cases  — led many victims down a dark, dead-end path. 

According to Noble, many people dismiss being bullied until they start to become physically ill from anxiety. 

The first large obstacle to grappling with bullying at work is denial; in many cases, the victim feels the issue is complicated and messy, so they decide to simply bear it, according to Noble. The trigger that sets change in motion usually comes from outside the bullying dynamic, in the form of coworkers willing to speak up. 

“The main takeaway is that it’s up to bystanders to stand up to the bully in these situations,” says Noble. “We need to say, ‘Hold on, something isn’t right here.’ We tell kids that too. If they have the courage to speak up, they greatly outnumber the bully. The earlier you intervene, the better. You do it before the behavior and people’s responses to it become entrenched.”

Creating a workplace culture where people are willing to risk the social consequences of standing up to a bully is difficult, but it’s much easier when employees can learn about the phenomenon. This realization was the genesis of the team’s Toward a Respectful Workplace website, which MSU’s WorkLife office has reconstituted over the past year. 

Worklife Office Executive Director Dr. Barbara Roberts is very optimistic about the future of the site, which she hopes will help others around the world, not just at MSU. She sees it as part of a larger cultural conversation about creating a society where everyone can flourish. 
 
Robust definitions, research findings, and strategies for combating workplace bullying can be found on The Toward a Respectful Workplace website. For questions, comments, or concerns about workplace bullying, you can reach the Worklife Office.