What comes to mind when you hear the word bully?
Perhaps you think of a school setting in which one child says to another, "Give me your lunch money, or I'll beat you up." But bullying extends beyond the school playground. Thus, psychologists have recently begun to study the phenomenon of bullying in the workplace.
Most researchers define a "workplace bully" as an employee who behaves in ways that cause harm to targeted co-workers. The motivations behind bullying are diverse. Some bullies are seeking to advance their own positions. Others are more focused on undermining the careers of others. However, in some cases, bullying seems to be more of a manifestation of an individual's personality than a means that he or she has adopted to achieve a particular goal.
The tactics employed by bullies may include yelling and name-calling as well as covert behaviors such as withholding information. In researchers' terminology, "targets" are the unfortunate victims of these behaviors. The institutional relationship between a bully and a target can be of any tipe, but bullying is probably most ovious when bullies are the targets' supervisors. In their book, The Bully at Work, psychologists Gary and ruth Namie (2000) describes four types of "bully-bosses." See if you recognize any of them. (Note that although the Namies developed these types with bosses in mind, they could be applied to organizational leaders or any situation in which one person bullies another.)
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