Workplace Bullying 'Epidemic' Worse Than Sexual Harassment

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Workplace bullying could cause more harm to employees than sexual harassment, researchers say.

Belittling comments, exclusion from outings and criticism of work may seem relatively benign and get brushed off by business higher-ups as "kid's stuff." But the consequences to employees and even the bottom line are far from child's play.

"Organizations don't realize that just rude behaviors, ongoing discourteous types of behaviors, have such negative effects on employees," said Sandy Hershcovis, assistant professor of business at the University of Manitoba, who is presenting research here today at the Seventh International Conference on Work, Stress and Health.

The meeting was co-sponsored by the American Psychological Association, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and the Society for Occupational Health Psychology.

"Unless you're in the situation you just don't understand," Hershcovis told LiveScience. "A lot of people say, 'Oh it's just a personality conflict, they don't really mean it.' But when you're in the situation - and many of us have been - it's pretty horrible."

Bully prevalence

The Workplace Bullying Institute found in a nationally representative poll last year that 37 percent of the U.S. workforce, or 54 million employees, have been bullied now or some time during their work life.

"Anything that affects 37 percent of the public is an epidemic. But it's a silent epidemic," said Gary Namie, Director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash.

Evidence from several research fields, including law, communications, business management and psychology, are revealing the hardships that targets of bullying face, and they ain't pretty.

"Targets of severe workplace bullying are suffering from physical and psychological conditions that would just drive even the strongest of us into the ground," said David Yamada, of Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Yamada chaired a presentation session here on workplace bullying.

Bully consequences

Hershcovis and Julian Barling of Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, reviewed 110 studies conducted over 21 years and involving the consequences of workplace aggression and sexual harassment. The research duo focused on 12 consequences, including: job satisfaction, co-worker and supervisor satisfaction, job stress, intent to quit, psychological and physical well-being, anger and anxiety levels, withdrawal from work and level of commitment.

Bullying is just one form of so-called workplace aggression, which the researchers divided into categories:

• Incivility: rudeness and discourteous verbal and non-verbal behaviors.
• Bullying: persistently criticizing employees' work; yelling; repeatedly reminding employees of mistakes; spreading gossip or lies; ignoring or excluding workers; and insulting employees' habits, attitudes or private life.
• Interpersonal conflict: behaviors of hostility, verbal aggression and angry exchanges.

Compared with sexually harassed workers, employees on the receiving end of raging-boss behaviors and other forms of workplace aggression reported lower overall well-being, less job satisfaction and less satisfaction with their bosses; they were also more likely to quit their jobs.

Specifically the bullied employees reported more job stress, less job commitment and higher levels of anger and anxiety than did sexually harassed employees.

The upshot

The review results by Hershcovis and Barling suggest that bullies can wreak more havoc on a company than can sexual harassment.

"I want to make sure that's not misinterpreted to mean that sexual harassment didn't also have negative outcomes; it did," Hershcovis said. "It's just that bullying was worse."

Some explanations for the findings include the fact that sexual harassment is illegal.

"There is a legal outlet to victims of sexual harassment," Hershcovis said. "Organizations have policies in place to prevent and deal with it. That ability to voice may give employees who experience sexual harassment some kind of hope."

In addition, since sexual aggression is illegal, the victims may be more likely to blame the perpetrator and not themselves, as can happen with workplace bullying, Hershcovis said.

Bully ban?

Beating up the bully may succeed on playgrounds, but inside the business world success is not so clear-cut. For one, often the bully is the boss or other manager, and so fighting back could cost a job.

While some countries, such as Sweden, and places like Quebec and Saskatchewan have implemented some form of anti-bullying workplace legislation, researchers here agree the United States has done little in the form of anti-bullying laws. Corporations in the United States also lack policies for preventing or dealing with workplace aggression.

"Employers ignore bullying because they can. Its legality is what gives them the license to ignore it," Namie said during his presentation at the conference.

Following in the footsteps of sexual harassment, however, bullying could gain enough awareness for legal action.

"Where we are now with workplace bullying is where we were with sexual harassment maybe 15 years ago," said Suzy Fox of Loyola University in Chicago, "before we had key court cases, before we had the major Anita Hill blow-up."

(In 1991, Hill, a law professor at the time, came forward with accusations that Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her.)

And like sexual harassment, workplace bullying needs a clear definition, Fox noted.

"Bullying is often more subtle, and may include behaviors that do not appear obvious to others," Hershcovis said. "For instance, how does an employee report to their boss that they have been excluded from lunch? Or that they are being ignored by a coworker? The insidious nature of these behaviors makes them difficult to deal with and sanction."

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Time Change: Springing Forward Could be Bad For You

"We are placing these people back into February. We are dealing with a public health issue and the extension of Daylight Saving Time at both ends is extending the period of year in which people are most vulnerable to depression."
—Michael Terman, Columbia University Medical Center

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Spring forward, fall back still stands but there's a new twist this year as Daylight Saving Time starts three weeks earlier and ends one week later.

Clocks around the United States are moved one hour on the second Sunday in March.

With an extra month of extra daylight, you won't need to switch on lights as often, which means reduced energy use and electricity bills. Whether the extra light hour actually saves a substantial amount of energy is up for debate, so this year will be the tester, experts say.

History of Daylight Savings

As far back as the 1700s, people recognized the potential to save energy by jumping clocks ahead one hour in the summer—Benjamin Franklin even wrote about it—although the idea was not put into practice until the 20th century. During both World Wars, the United States and Great Britain began observing Daylight Saving Time. After the war, U.S. states were free to choose whether to observe Daylight Saving Time and the calendar start dates of the time change. The result was time confusion for travelers and newscasters. In 1966, Congress enacted the Uniform Time Act, which stated that if any state observed Daylight Saving, it had to follow a uniform protocol, beginning and ending on the same dates throughout the country.

Meanwhile, the time switch could shake up your biological clock, rattle your mood and give your bones and teeth an extra dose of vitamin D.

• Tips: How to Survive the Time Change

It is worth it?

The change is the result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Instead of starting on the first Sunday in April and ending on the last Sunday in October, Daylight Saving now begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday of November.

Energy savings was one primary motivation behind the shift, but it's arguable whether the change will be worthwhile. The California Energy Commission estimated that the extra month will save the state only one-half of 1 percent of their current energy expenditures.

The Department of Energy issued a report that also predicted relatively small energy savings for the country as a whole, and will issue another report in the fall detailing the actual savings, said Department of Energy spokesperson Tom Welch. If Congress deems the energy savings too small, they might even revert back to the old start and end dates, he told LiveScience.

"It might be a one-year deal," Welch said.

Your brain's clock

Changing household clocks can be a small chore. Changing your body's internal clock will be trickier.

A cluster of brain cells located in the hypothalamus acts as your body's timekeeper. The neural ticker, also called a circadian rhythm, tells your body when to eat, sleep, wake up and perform many other body functions over the course of a day.

Light is the key to cuing up the internal clock. For instance, sunrise directs the body to release various "wakeful" hormones, which boost metabolism, blood pressure and body temperature. Sunset tells the body it's time to wind down and sleep.

To keep your body systems in sync with local time, your body's internal clock relies on cues from sunlight, particularly early morning light.

"A long series of research studies over the past 20 years has now focused down on the critical element and that is early morning sunlight exposure," said Michael Terman, director of the Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms at Columbia University Medical Center.

Time's a changing

Daylight Saving Time effectively snatches a morning hour and adds it to your evenings. That means 7 a.m. Daylight Saving Time is equivalent to 6 a.m. standard time, so your typically sunlit mornings will be dark. The morning darkness could keep your biological clock in winter mode.

"We know for the population as a whole that depressive symptoms become worse during the winter months," Terman said.

Winter blues, affecting about 35 million Americans, are a mild form of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which affects as many as 12 million Americans. Symptoms of SAD include depression, sleep problems, cravings for sweets and other carbohydrates, sluggishness and headaches. The doldrums begin to ramp up some time in the fall and typically remit by the second week of May, Terman said.

"We are making the sun rise even an hour later than it otherwise would during a period when these symptoms should be beginning to improve," Terman said in a telephone interview.

"We are placing these people back into February," Terman said. "We are dealing with a public health issue and the extension of Daylight Saving Time at both ends is extending the period of year in which people are most vulnerable to depression."

Even if you are down in the dumps, you might want to flash a smile. The extra daily sunshine later in the day could boost the health of your teeth, said Charles Hildebolt of Washington University School of Medicine.

That's because sunshine boosts your body's vitamin D, which is crucial for calcium absorption. Studies have shown that deficiencies in calcium and vitamin D can lead to dental diseases and overall bone loss.

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Telling smokers 'age' of lungs helps them quit

Simple test improves likelihood of someone kicking the habit, study finds

LONDON - Smokers are more likely to kick the habit if they are told how “old” their lungs are, a British study found on Friday.

The concept of lung age — measured by comparing a smoker’s lungs to the age of a healthy person whose lungs function the same — has helped patients better understand how smoking damages health, researchers had already found.

But that information is also effective in convincing smokers to quit, said Gary Parkes, a family physician in Hertfordshire outside London, who led the study published in the British Medical Journal.

“Telling smokers their lung age significantly improves the likelihood of them quitting smoking,” Parkes and his colleagues wrote.

Smoking kills about four million people each year, according to the World Health Organization. Tobacco is highly addictive and the leading preventable cause of both cancer and heart disease.

The study in five general medical practices outside London involved 561 long-term smokers older than 35 and began with a simple test to record the volume and rate at which the volunteers exhaled air from the lungs.

One group received no detailed information about their results while the other people were given their lung age, shown a diagram of how smoking ages the lungs and told that quitting would slow the rate of damage.

Everyone was also strongly encouraged to quit and offered help to do so. One year later, saliva tests showed that 13 percent of the smokers told their lung age had quit while only 6 percent of people in the other group had stopped.

“Anybody who had good, understandable information seemed more inclined to give up,” Parkes said. “The reason may be people had dreaded the worst and realized it was still worthwhile giving up.”

Benefits of early screening
The study counters research showing such health information does not prod them to quit and underscores the benefits of early screening because 16 percent of the people in the study had undiagnosed emphysema, Parkes said.

Giving people this kind of information could represent a cheap and easy way to get people to stop smoking and reduce smoking-related health problems that are putting pressure on health systems to treat.

“The cost, if you like, is certainly within the economic framework of a good deal,” Parkes said.

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