A huge three out of five UK workers claim to have been bullied at some point by their boss, while 30% say they are experiencing such behaviour right now.
According to a poll among 400 employees undertaken by online jobs board, CareerBuilder.co.uk, the two most common bullying techniques are to blame people for mistakes that they haven’t made and to criticise them constantly (47% respectively),
Ignoring them (36%) and belittling them during meetings (35%) were also favourite weapons of the workplace bully.
Rosemary Haefner, CareerBuilder’s global vice president of HR, said: “How workers define bullying can vary considerably, but it is often tied to patterns of unfair treatment. Bullying can have a significant impact on both individual and company performance.”
But a mere 44% of those questioned said that they actually reported bullying incidents to HR, often preferring to confront the perpetrator themselves (53%), to varying effect.
Some 15% indicated that the situation actually got worse as a result of the confrontation, but 43% took the step of involving HR at that point – although a worrying 23% said that nothing was done as a result.
As to who the worst offenders in the bullying stakes were, 59% pointed to bosses or colleagues (41%), while 6% of victims blamed their customers.
