Bullying in the family is something that happens all the time. If you have children of different ages, it is inevitable that the elder will target the younger particularly when he or she finds that the new sibling is getting more attention. It turns reprehensible when parents start bullying kids. That too happens in discipline-oriented India.

Given this background, it is inevitable that bullying should move to the workplace. It’s not just in India; bullying is a phenomenon the world over. And it’s on the rise. The outcome: 16 per cent fell sick and another 17 per cent quit their jobs.

Such statistics are not available in India. But research done by organisational behaviour professors Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha (both of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad) shows that bullying is alive and kicking in the Indian workplace. What’s worse is that the role of HR departments is to try and brush the whole thing under the carpet. The victim seldom gets a response to complaints; he or she is often cast in the role of problem creator. An option often exercised is to exit the company. But this, while eliminating the immediate problem, creates grounds for it to grow in the future. When slapping a subordinate is considered acceptable behaviour in an organisation, more people will become 'slap happy'.

Most of the time, bullying starts with the boss. For whatever reason, he takes an adverse view of a particular employee. Initially, it’s a matter of ticking him off. If the employee accepts all this without a murmur, it could turn into physical harassment, though it is still very covert in most office environments. (Incidentally, women bosses from hell are far more toxic than their male counterparts; perhaps they feel they need to show how tough they are).

When the boss turns his guns on an employee, others in the office feel free to do so too. Sometime it is just to gain brownie points with the boss. Sometimes it is to create a point of rapport. But the end result is that the poor sap identified as target gets it in the neck from all directions.

The HR department sees it a situation of many against one. Its concern is not what is right but what is good for the organisation. Even if it is a question of boss versus subordinate, the boss will win because he contributes more to the bottomline. When he is accompanied in his bullying by others, sheer numbers tilt the scale; it was never in danger of going the victim’s way anyway. The IIMA study records the bewilderment of the victims when the HR department treats them as though they were the problem.

Bullying is more rampant in the West than in Asia (see table). But there may be reasons for that. According to observers, bullying in the Indian context is ill-defined. There are many who consider it the norm in the workplace. The figures may be skewed because of that.

In the West, parental bullying is now a hot-button subject. A friend reports from New Jersey that when his six-year-old son mistakenly dialled 911 while fiddling with the phone, the cops landed up almost immediately.

They accepted the explanations, but for weeks after that the family found noisy police vehicles zipping past their house at all hours. It was to tell them that Big Brother was watching.

In the workplace, people are adults. They are expected to take care of themselves. But it is easy to let problems go out of hand. The bullies — bosses or co-workers — must be brought to book. Prefer a Black Maria over an ambulance.