Bullying in the workplace is a fairly common phenomenon. It happens on the shopfloor; it happens in the cubicle farms. And, would you believe it, it happens in the corner office.

On the face of it, that seems difficult to imagine. The corner office is populated by the bosses of the organisation. Why should they bully or be bullied? Leave out the lala-led companies. The owner or promoter is often a benevolent despot; professionalism is years away. Bullying in these places is a way of exercising authority.

But bullying can happen in semi-professional organisations too. Think of a large company with interests in infrastructure and media. The second-generation CEO meets the heads of his group companies only at the oddest of hours. You may find them outside his office at 10 pm. You may find them there again a couple of hours later — in tears. Their white hairs don’t protect them from the mother of a shellacking – deserved or not.

Why do they stay? First, they are used to it. They have experienced this for years. Second, it is likely that they are not particularly competent at their jobs. So where would they go? The issue has become a topic of discussion because of recent changes in Australia’s Fair Work Act. HR practitioners have pointed out the provisions for bullying now cover members of the board of directors too. That’s caused some raised eyebrows. But bullying does come in various forms.

If you were a fly on the wall at a Satyam Computers board meeting, you would have noticed some murmurs by directors imported from Ivy League colleges. They were there to give a façade of good corporate governance. When the murmurs became a little louder, CEO B. Ramalinga Raju would tell the objectors that an explanation would be forthcoming after the meeting. Ask not what happened after the meeting; some directors were even appointed as consultants with an additional fee. Raju bullied everybody into accepting his line and his way. When the edifice finally came crashing down, he had stolen several thousand crores.

It doesn’t have to be dishonest. A strong CEO can often bully the board into accepting his thinking. “People in positions of authority are invested with legitimate power, and using it constructively to accomplish business goals is justifiable and expected,” says Susan Lucia Annunzio, president and CEO of The Center for High Performance, a Chicago-based organisational consulting and research firm. “But in today’s world, in which businesses must make complex decisions in the face of incomplete information and a rapidly-changing landscape, no single person has all the answers.

Leaders who are dismissive, instil fear or continually demonstrate “who’s the boss” discourage employees from expressing their ideas. What would have happened if the young Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg had needed to convince a powerful executive bully that their game-changing ideas were worth pursuing?” According to Harvard Business Review: “True collaboration is impossible when people don’t trust one another to speak with candour. Solving problems requires that team members be unafraid to ask questions or propose wrong answers.”

Before you start thinking that the bully in the boardroom is always the boss, there are two developments in recent times that indicate the contrary. Large shareholders want Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, to split the company into two – beverages and snackfoods. Many board meetings are spent fighting against representatives of these shareholders. It doesn’t help the company go forward.

Check out also some of the startups. The money men who have backed them are there in full force at board meetings. They want their pound of flesh; they want to exit with a handsome profit. They even insist that the company show a better performance short term, sacrificing long-term strategy. These are the times when entrepreneurship gets totally stifled. There are many new ventures that have collapsed because of such bullying and greed.

THE BULLY AT WORK

Bullying tactics*

• The Screaming Mimi is a person who chooses to yell and curse in a public setting. This case is actually somewhat rare, but it is, in a way, the prototypical bullying scenario.
• The Constant Critic family of bullying tactics concerns what people do behind closed doors. Since the majority of bullies are bosses, they are able to evaluate and appraise their subordinates. So when they want to bully a target, what they typically do is abuse the performance appraisal system.
• The third category is the Two-Headed Snake family of tactics. This involves rumour-mongering and back-stabbing between co-workers. From the boss’s point of view, this may mean pitting worker against worker, prohibiting someone from talking to somebody else or helping somebody on a task.
• The fourth family of tactics is about withholding things that people need. We call these the Gatekeeper family of tactics. For instance, I might deny someone training, even though I’ve just given them a new job for which they have no skills.

As defined by Gary Namie of the Workplace Bullying Institute, interviewed by legalchecklist.org