Introduction
It is important not only to study the causes and consequences of bullying but also to develop recommendations on how to neutralize or control this phenomenon. There are a large number of practical manuals published in different countries, which describe in detail the rules and procedures that need to be implemented by managers who are faced with bullying. All manuals state the simplest fact that bullying by itself does not disappear. On the contrary, if no preventive or therapeutic measures are taken at the organizational level to combat it, it will grow, spread like a contagious disease, affecting an increasing number of units of specific organizations. It is important to consider the main ways of managing bullying, which can conditionally be divided into personal, organizational, and legal.
Prevention and Current Practices
In the modern world, one can find two meaningfully mutually exclusive recipes for neutralizing bullying on a personal level. On the one hand, we are talking about the need to raise self-esteem, develop social communication skills, and form a high level of professionalism. It is professionalism that is the most effective way to counter bullying. This is because a high-class professional is so self-sufficient and satisfied with the work that he becomes relatively indifferent to the attacks of his colleagues. On the other hand, it is important to understand that if an employee has become a victim of bullying, then at some point, he should leave the organization to maintain mental and physical health. If it is impossible to prevent this problem, the employee should leave to maintain his health, career, and finances.
Victims might need to find a new place of work until their reputation, and their spirit is destroyed. A report from the Bullying Institute at the workplace provides statistics that, in 65% of cases, bullying stops only when the victim quits (2017 WBI U.S. Workplace Bullying Survey, 2017). Such deplorable results are also observed for the reason that in modern organizations, the mechanism of counteracting bullying and helping its victim is still not very well-tuned. Thus, according to the American report. 61% of American employers either support bullying or are themselves a source of bullying (2017 WBI U.S. Workplace Bullying Survey, 2017). Several organizational methods of management are more effective than personal methods of counteracting bullying.
The most important thing is to conduct training for managers at all levels, the purpose of which is to familiarize themselves with the theory of bullying and teach them how to diagnose, prevent and eliminate bullying in the workplace. According to several signs, managers should be able to recognize the fact of the presence of bullying in their organization and take specific actions to combat it. It is important to carry out the practice of intervention, active intervention in the situation to publicly clarify the rules of conduct adopted by the organization. The administration of organizations should pursue a zero-tolerance policy concerning bullying practices.
Organizations should include specially trained employees who could be contacted by employees affected by bullying for help. All employees should take training courses in which they can get acquainted with the company’s policy regarding acceptable and unacceptable forms of behavior in the organization, as well as with forms of dealing with bullying. Courses are also necessary for the reason that not all modern workers are familiar with the concept of bullying and have ideas about its negative consequences. All employees should be familiar with the procedure of informing managers or filing a complaint to authorized persons in the event of bullying (Johnson, 2015).
If bullying took place and specific employees suffered from it, managers need to carry out activities to protect and rehabilitate them, that is, provide them with psychological assistance and restore their professional and personal reputation.
In addition, it is important to conduct mediation procedures to reconcile and establish cooperation relations between the conflicting parties. In extreme cases, disciplinary action against bullying may be provided. It should be borne in mind that mediation techniques can only be used in the initial stages of bullying. In the same case, if the bullying was prolonged and had severe consequences for the victim, the latter is unlikely to be able to engage in discussion with his tyrant, demanding only trial and retaliation. In some cases, there may be cases when the victims of bullying go to court, and the guilt of the bullies is proven.
If no methods of intervention in the bullying situation were successful and it was not possible to resume constructive relations between its participants, managers should help the bullying facility move to another unit or department of the organization, or find another place of work.
To diagnose the organization’s bullying, managers need to conduct regular research using sociological methods. There are many different methodological guidelines for identifying bullyings, such as a survey, interview, focus group, case study, self-report through diary entries, bubble dialogue, observation, and a multimodal approach (Johnson, 2015). The complete description of the various methods of learning bullying in an organization can be found in professional guidelines and guidelines. There are also legal ways to deal with bullying. In several countries, legal acts have been adopted whose purpose is to combat bullying. It is worth noting that the adoption of legal acts can be the most effective way to combat bullying for employees of the organization.
Conclusion
In conclusion, bullying in the workplace should be studied based on an interdisciplinary approach that allows you to systematize the psychological, sociological, legal, and managerial features of this phenomenon. In the context of sociological analytics, it is advisable to talk about internal interdisciplinary structure considering bullying at the intersection of several sociological disciplines, such as conflict sociology, management sociology, organization sociology, and emotion sociology.
Promising areas for further analysis of bullying include several processes. This includes actions such as studying the relationship between the extent of bullying in a particular society and the level of macro and micro trust. In companies where the level of trust is high, the prevalence of bullying is likely to be less than where it is low. In addition, it is important to study the relationship between the spread of bullying in a particular team and the value orientations of its corporate culture.
In societies that have experienced various forms of social or cultural trauma, bullying in organizations can be distributed much more widely than is stably developing and prosperous countries. In regions where unemployment is high, bullying in the workplace may be more intense than where it is low, as a result of increased competition for job preservation.
Reference List
Johnson, S. L. (2015). âWorkplace bullying prevention: a critical discourse analysisâ, 71(10), pp. 2384-2392.
2017 WBI U.S. Workplace Bullying Survey (2017). Web.