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The Bully at Work
Sourcebooks Inc.
By Gary Namie and Ruth Namie
paperback 287 pp $14.95

You wake up sweating from your dream. In it, your supervisor is barking, "I AM THE BOSS!!! DO WHAT I TELL YOU!!!" Worse, he cuts you out of the information loop, smiling as he does it. Or he reacts to your just-finished report by frowning and peering over the top of his glasses with a "just sucked a lemon" look.

If this is no dream, you might be the target of an office bully, a phenomenon so widespread it affects one in five US workers -- a hidden iceberg of job stress that exacts a huge emotional, physical, and economic toll.

That's just one fact that San Francisco Bay Area psychologists Gary and Ruth Namie cite in their new softcover book on low-lifes who are turning American workplaces into miserable dungeons of ulcer-exacerbating servitude.

"Bullies are difficult people with horns," says Gary Namie, a social-organizational psychologist who, with his psychotherapist wife, Ruth, wrote The Bully at Work: What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity on the Job. Bullies, they say, "eat nice people alive."

Being a nice person, I know this, after I suffered the humiliating shouting of one memorable editor as he whacked my copy to bits. Of course, this guy was a prince compared to the insurance executive ex-boss of my very nice friend, Sandra.

"I called her the psycho," Sandra once told me. "She'd tell you to do one thing, and when you did it, she'd scream at you. Once, she made someone do 22 drafts of a report before she was satisfied. The rub was that draft No. 22 was just like Draft. No. 4. Things got so bad that every morning I'd walk into the office and ask, 'Is she dead yet?' "

Yes, Sandra's tyrant was a woman, an occurrence so common that the Namies, throughout their 287-page book, refer to both bullies and their Targets (their capitalization) as "she." Their research shows that while both men and women bully equally, both target women for their bullying. What's more, female bullies are more likely to select female targets -- 84 percent of the time -- than male bullies, who select female targets 69 percent of the time.

"Women target women more," Gary Namie says. "It's almost like a sorority hazing. I went through hell and so shall you."

That politically uncomfortable discovery is just one tidbit from the Namies' considerable research into bullies and their targets, based on their private practice, their consulting work, and experience with their Benicia, California-based nonprofit organization, Campaign Against Workplace Bullying, which has an Internet Web site at www.bullybusters.org. So what's the difference between a mere jerk and a bully? The bully harms.

"Bullying," as the book defines it, "is the malicious verbal mistreatment of a Target (the recipient) by a harassing bully (the perpetrator) that is driven by the bully's desire to control the Target."

Among the bully's tactics: cruel acts of deliberate humiliation or interference, and withholding resources or support to prevent targets from succeeding at work. Beginning to sound familiar? Workplace bullying is instantly recognizable to someone who's been through it or knows someone who has. That's why we find the comic strip "Dilbert," with its idiot bosses, so funny, the Namies write. But nobody's laughing at the stress and trauma that bullying spawns. It can result in reduced immunity to infection, menstrual difficulties, hypertension, and even heart attacks.

A recent survey of the campaign's Web-site visitors also indicated a constellation of other effects of bullying: stress, depression, exhaustion, insecurity, shame, obsessive thinking or nightmares, poor concentration, and sleeplessness. Between 75 and 90 percent of visits to primary care physicians are motivated by stress-related problems, according to the American of Stress. With disastrous effects on productivity looming, you'd think corporate America would pounce on the problem.

Instead, the Namies say, companies reward bullies as good leaders while turning viciously against targets who complain about the harassment. Bosses, unsurprisingly, make up 89 percent of bullies. Let's face it. Bullying is rarely illegal and damnably difficult to prove. Despite the grim prospects, the Namies still exhort targets to fight their bullies. One way is to pull oneself out of "bullying paralysis" and stop the bully in her or his tracks. In other words, "bully proofing" themselves.

Bullies are lazy and will find another target if the first one proves troublesome. Emboldened, a former target can even engage in "bully busting" to bring the tyrant down, though this suggestion comes with a disclaimer not to try it until one is ready.

In the end, the Namies offer a conscientious and highly readable account of bullying and ways to avoid its devastation. While suggesting therapy or other outside help if need be, they also offer do-it-yourself advice. Lots of it.

Indeed, Section Two of the book is dominated by detailed emotional inventory charts aimed at shoring up targets so they can bully-proof themselves. If you are in desperate straits because of a bully, you will probably inhale all of it in a snap, though I found it somewhat overly analytical. I also sometimes found the book's recurring boldfaced affirmations a bit tedious: "Bullying is NOT The Target's fault!" or "Bullies are Liars and Cowards!"

But the Namies' premise that bullies destroy the emotional core of targets comes through quite clearly, justifying their heavy focus on bully-proofing strategies. They bring light to a dark side of the American workplace and exhort the bullied to take action.

Happy bully busting!

-- Annie Nakao is a staff writer for the San Francisco Examiner and a Knight fellow at Stanford University. She received a daily news reporting award from the National Association of Black Journalists for her series on the academic achievement of black middle-class students.

First published September 22, 2000
Last updated November 25, 2008
Copyright © 2000 Consumer Health Interactive

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