Bullying In The Workplace Essay

Bullying in the workplace seems to be on the rise. It certainly attracts much more attention in the media. There may be some very good reasons for why this destructive phenomenon is on the increase. With an economy that had the bottom drop out, job security is almost non-existent. Bullying is a phenomenon of unequal power. One member has power over another. This differential increases as job security drops. Rather than negotiating differences of opinion, the member with the greatest power can now impose their view on those with lesser power. On the positive side, there may be growing emphasis and pressure on organizations to be more accountable to employees who experience workplace bullying.

Problem statement
These numbers represent Sweden but Einarsen and Skogstad´s study from 1996 found similar results in Norway. Their study was conducted on 7 986 employees, with different professions from different organizations, and the results showed that 8.6 percent had experienced workplace bullying during a six months period (1996). Workplace bullying is a widespread issue – especially in Scandinavia – and the issue could benefit from further investigation (Saunders et al. 2007). Most of the conducted research in this specific study field has been concentrated to Scandinavia and Northern Europe (Einarsen, 2000).6 From a review of the existing literature in the field, the authors of this thesis have found three major reasons for why the Scandinavian countries are on the front edge in research on workplace bullying. First, bullying in the schoolyard has been a research tradition in Scandinavia since the past twenty years (Olweus, 1994) and has been an observed phenomenon in schools. Second; “The Scandinavian interest in harassment at work builds on the assumption (and the everyday observation) that other kinds of Harassment exist in organizations which may be as frequent and as severe as sexual Harassment in terms of individual suffering and organizational costs”