The Communal Character of Bullying Conflicts

One of the tendencies, especially in U.S. organizations and popular thought, is to indi­vidualize the problem of workplace bullying. Supervisors, manager, and bystanders often blame the victims for their own abuse and label targets’ reports of abuse as overexagger­ated, subjective, and questionable (Keashly, 2001).

of conflict and avoid, at least partially, such myopic viewpoints. Thinking of bullying as a matter involving only a bully and a target contributes to viewing it as a solely subjective experience and stunts efforts to resolve this toxic form of conflict. From such a stance, managers and peers are less likely to believe target reports and thus take corrective action (Namie & Lutgen-Sandvik, 2010). Because workplaces are collective sites of human inter­action, what occurs between any dyad or among group members bleeds and buzzes throughout the workgroup and affects all in proximity (Waldron, 2000). Thus, some understanding of target, bully, and bystander perspectives—especially their motivations— sheds light on some of the reasons these con­flicts are so difficult to resolve.

Certainly, any view of the reality of bully­ing conflicts is partial, and current research on the subject may overemphasize the target perspective. Although literature on adult bul­lying extensively examines targets’ perspec­tives in these conflicts, it less often explores bystanders’ experiences (for an exception, see Vartia, 2001), and bully explanations are nearly nonexistent (for an exception, see Rayner & Cooper, 2003). We call attention to the fact that bullying conflicts involve a ll affected workers, whether or not those work­ers are actively engaged in conflict communi­cation and behavior. Bullying conflicts slowly colonize and take over nearly all actions and interactions in workgroups where it is present. To gain a better picture of this involvement, the core material in the chapter explores three interrelated factors associated with targets, bystanders, and bullies: (1) general profiles,

(2) motivations to act or withhold action, and

(3) conflict tactics. We outline these factors because involved parties may be reticent or unable to report them for a number of rea­sons. They might not fully understand their motivations; they may feel bound by emotion display rules; they might feel compelled to perform certain image management work, or some combination of these. The three factors flesh out bullying conflicts in particularly use­ful ways.