The number of unreported cases is high, and the consequences are serious. And yet bullying is as commonplace in German offices as desks, office chairs or telephones. Bullying, or psychological terror in the workplace, has nothing to do with occasional teasing; it is an attack on employees’ mental and, in some cases, physical health. Although there is still no specific “bullying clause” in criminal law, in serious cases offences such as bodily harm, coercion, insult or defamation may apply. High time to talk about a serious workplace risk. As colleagues, you share the desk, take lunch breaks together, and yet caution is sometimes needed here.
What is bullying?
To get to the bottom of the phenomenon of “mobbing” properly, let’s start by splitting hairs over language. You might assume that an Anglicism adopted into German would at least mean exactly the same as it does in its language of origin. But that is only partly true: the English word “mobbing” actually describes a state, namely “to harass” or “to surround something”. As a noun, it is used in a similar way to German, but English has a few further gradations: first “mobbing” (harassing), then “harassing” (disturbing, intimidating), and finally the word that describes a process like the Denglish term “Mobbing”: “bullying”.
Bullying or mobbing – what’s with the nitpicking over words?
Anyone who has ever been confronted with psychological terror in the workplace will place particular value on such distinctions. Proper bullying has just as little to do with abuse as it does with harassment. Someone who is abusive or harasses others at work is clearly crossing a line, and not just the line of decency. But real bullying goes further than a lapse that may stem from a flare of anger. If you look at the many meanings of the word “bullying”, you get closer to the point: “to tyrannise”, “to harass” or “to intimidate”, for example. The person doing the harassing, the “bully”, is described as a “tyrant” or a “brutal guy; thug”. Brutality and tyranny have a different quality and much more staying power than a brief outburst that crosses the line. Psychological terror, the correct translation of “bullying”, however, hits the nail exactly on the head. It is not only victims of bullying who ask why it is necessary at all to use a false Anglicism for something that the German language can describe very precisely.
Nevertheless, Mobbing has become established as a synonym for psychological terror in the workplace. Thanks to the ability to anonymously shower people with abuse on the internet, the word has spawned an offshoot in “cyber-bullying”. The essence of this digression: psychological terror in the workplace exists on a different scale from abuse or harassment, which may be the result of a sudden emotional flare-up. Psychological terror, on the contrary, requires cold calculation. If you want to move closer to a definition, “Mobbing” can be described as the intention to drive someone out of a particular social group through targeted, repeated and regular harassment. No wonder the workplace has become the most common setting for such attacks. Competition is fierce, and those who do not have what it takes to work their way up through performance simply bully their way clear. And it is by no means only colleagues of equal rank who tyrannise each other. Bullying often also comes from the top down – a particularly insidious form of psychological terror, because those affected are even less able to defend themselves than against colleagues at the same hierarchical level.
On the history of the term “Mobbing”
Colleagues and managers defaming and isolating one another in order to wear each other down over time is, of course, behaviour that is far older than the term used to describe it. The term first entered public and business debate in the early 1990s. According to a representative study for the Federal Republic of Germany by the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, reports of attacks, harassment or social exclusion by colleagues or managers were becoming increasingly common at that time across all occupational groups. Initial studies carried out in Scandinavia by a group of researchers led by the late psychologist and pioneer of bullying research Heinz Leymann already showed back then that bullying was anything but a marginal phenomenon. The publication of the study caused a stir in the Federal Republic: health insurers, trade unions and churches all took up the issue. The first self-help groups, workplace initiatives and even a nationwide hotline were set up.
2002: The first German bullying report
After the turn of the millennium, the first bullying report for Germany based on representative data was published. Its findings on psychological terror in the workplace included the following: well over one million working Germans suffered from bullying, with older employees facing an increased risk, but those under 25 being the most affected. The highest risk of bullying was found among social workers, social pedagogues and childcare workers – followed at some distance by sales staff, banking and insurance professionals, technicians and healthcare workers, IT specialists and accounting clerks, as well as people working in office-based roles. Broken down by sector, the publishing industry had the sharpest elbows, followed by the wood, credit and electricity sectors.
The authors of the study considered it important to note that the term “bullying” was often used inappropriately – something that, incidentally, was still true a good 15 years later. They pointed out that isolated taunts and conflicts in the workplace were often prematurely labelled as bullying. Since psychological terror in the workplace was also hardly defined uniformly as bullying in academic literature, they largely based their work on Leymann’s description of bullying as “negative communicative acts directed at a person (by one or more others), which occur very frequently and over a longer period of time, thereby characterising the relationship between perpetrator and victim”. The authors therefore derived the following definition for their work: “Bullying is understood to mean that someone in the workplace is frequently harassed, intimidated or disadvantaged and excluded over a longer period of time.”
Upward trend: bullying is and remains a problem
Of course, bullying has always existed. However, individual surveys and studies show that the willingness to make colleagues’ lives difficult through targeted attacks has increased in recent times. On the other hand, the problem is better known today, so it is not only works councils, trade unions or interest groups that are keeping a particularly close eye on employee behaviour in the workplace. Especially at a time of constantly increasing working hours, managers are keen to ensure there is a good working atmosphere in the office. However, there is also a high percentage of bullying that arises out of sheer boredom – with no specific trigger and no far-reaching agenda. As colleagues, you often sit office chair next to office chair, so the mood should be right. These days, partitions are available, and the layout of office furniture can also create a bit of distance.
The latter can also be observed away from the workplace. Whether with the help of the internet or directly in the school playground: ever since the word “victim” became established as an insult in youth slang and tends to provoke mockery rather than sympathy, bullying among young people in particular has reached a level that borders on contempt for humanity. Canadian Amanda Todd became tragically well known. In her case, an unprecedented hate campaign online and in the school playground ended in suicide. In recent years, numerous young people aged between 13 and 15 have also taken their own lives after enduring prolonged direct or indirect attacks. The perpetrators, an indistinct swarm of classmates, acquaintances and even complete strangers who join in the abuse, are of course never caught and therefore cannot be punished either.
Bullying schoolchildren become bullying employees. That is why it is so important for colleagues and managers to remain vigilant when it comes to psychological terror in the workplace and not to tolerate behaviour that qualifies as bullying, not even in its earliest stages.