Screaming "You stink!" and blowing raspberries as someone strides across the office does not at first look like the kind of horrific abuse that requires redress to the tune of £817,000. But Helen Green, a City administrator, found the campaign of harassment by four women colleagues and one man over her four years working for Deutsche Bank so "offensive, abusive, intimidating, denigrating, bullying, humiliating, patronising, infantile and insulting" that she was driven to a nervous breakdown. The high court agreed earlier this week, leading to unsympathetic chatter on TV and talk radio about the amount of compensation awarded to the 36-year-old. But the verdict has also been celebrated as a belated recognition of the pernicious presence of bullying in the workplace.
For some, modern society is ruled by the bullies, and all kinds of people become victims. The public service union Unison had to step in when two male manual workers at a university complained that they were being routinely reduced to tears by their female manager. And yet, says a Unison spokeswoman, "It's more difficult for men to seek help and say, 'Look, I'm being bullied. Can someone do something about it?' because they feel they are a grown man and no one should be bullying them."
Millions, meanwhile, have become voyeurs of bullying-as-popular-entertainment on The Weakest Link, X Factor, The Apprentice and Big Brother, where glamour model Jodie Marsh was routinely reduced to tears by George Galloway et al on the Celebrity series earlier this year. Like Galloway, alpha males in the hypercompetitive worlds of politics and football, from Alastair Campbell to Alex "Hairdryer" Ferguson, are feted for their aggressive dealings and verbal denunciations of colleagues and rivals. From the lowliest call centre to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister - criticised for the bullying of staff in a Commons report last year - bullying seems to be commonplace. The union Amicus estimates that bullies cost businesses £1.8bn a year in sick days and lost productivity.
To others, of course, "bullying" behaviour is charisma in action. By this thinking, leaders who offer masterful examples of motivational power are being emasculated by a burgeoning compensation culture and a readiness to believe that the slightest raised voice must belong to a sociopathic bully. Cosseted and mollycoddled, we are unwilling to accept one bad day at work or a ticking-off from the boss. Part of the scepticism over bullying is because it is not always precisely defined. Charities and psychologists that tackle bullying see it as an abuse of power which is persistent and happens over a period of time. As Helen Green discovered, little incidents may look insignificant in themselves but have a devastating effect when not tackled.
"The childish connotations of the word take us back to the playground, and as an adult we're not happy to go there. So we tend to call workplace bullying different things - a personality clash, or 'strong, firm management'," says Lyn Witheridge, chief executive of the Andrea Adams Trust. Set up to fight bullying at work, the charity fields 80 calls a day from employees - and bosses - seeking help.
Eradicating bullying promises to be a task as neverending as the war on terror. It is clearly no longer tolerated in schools, although that does not stop it. A Home Office study of girls aged 12 to 16 found that about a third had been bullied. On average, 16 victims of bullying in schools commit suicide each year. The International Conference on Workplace Bullying, held at Trinity College, Dublin, in June, was told that 100 people in Ireland kill themselves every year because of bullying. As the "extreme bitchiness and mob culture" experienced by Helen Green shows, the tactics of the playground can be repeated in the workplace. Perpetrators and the victims may be the same, too. "We find that many people who have been bullied at work have been bullied at school," says Liz Carnell, director of the charity Bullying Online. "There needs to be research into the way school bullying affects you later in life. There is a relationship between the two."
Just as bullying can follow you into adulthood, so it moves from playground to staffroom. An "autocratic" headteacher at a cathedral school in Plymouth drove her deputy out of her job, a tribunal ruled in June. The actions of Catherine Maltbaek, head of St Mary primary school, were called the "worst case of bullying ever seen in the workplace" by Christine Pratt, founder of the National Bullying Helpline. Sue Preston won her claim, saying she had been told off in front of pupils and constantly belittled and undermined, to say nothing of having her tormentor ring a bell in her ear "like a town crier". Maltbaek denied bullying her staff, conceding only that she could be "sharp and abrupt".
All kinds of other workplaces - from City firms to the army to fast-food outlets (Hannah Kirkham, 18, committed suicide after being tormented and stabbed in the arm with corn sticks while working for KFC) - may be home to bullying. But now they have to do something about it. The 1997 Protection from Harassment Act - dubbed the "stalker" act - is now being used by employment lawyers to combat workplace bullying. Last month, a judgment by five law lords created a new way for people to sue their employers for damages over bullying. William Majrowski, a clinical audit coordinator at Guy's and St Thomas's NHS trust in London, won the right to use the act against his bosses to claim he was bullied by his manager because he was gay. Previously, it was difficult to bring bullying cases to court because workers had to prove both that their employers knew or should have known they were being bullied and that the bullying caused psychiatric illness. Now employers can be vicariously liable for bullying by employees even if management is unaware of it.
Witheridge is delighted about the use of the "stalking act" to tackle workplace bullying. "But there are no winners when you go to the law," she says. "The company has lost and Helen has lost too - she has been crucified psychologically." The act, and the furore over the compensation, is a real opportunity to tackle bullying at work, according to Witheridge: "Bullying is now too costly to ignore." She believes the Lords ruling gives employers a clear mandate to draw up a bullying policy and make staff aware of workplace bullying. There is no one best practice. What may be acceptable in a garage would not be in a boardroom. But an anti-bullying policy would make staff aware of the boundaries and offer procedures to deal with it.
A growing number of companies do have anti-harassment or "dignity at work" policies that define and outlaw bullying in the workplace. "They usually make the assumption that if you're thinking you're being harassed, you are," says business psychologist Michael Guttridge. Are we becoming a nation of wilting violets - and compensation-seeking ones at that? Even occupational psychologists, who the terminally cynical would accuse of making a living out of workplace distress, agree this could be the case. "What a manager might think is professionally managing someone can be seen as being picked on," says Guttridge. "It's hard to get an objective measure of bullying. Harassment around race or gender is clear-cut. It's the insidious stuff - when you're being micro-managed by your boss, or you feel you are never good enough for them. Sometimes it's just a clash of styles."
The boundary between bullying and assertive management may be increasingly hard to draw. The Andrea Adams Trust receives an increasing number of calls from victims of public-sector bullying. "We've got an increasingly target- driven culture and a lot of pressure on individuals to achieve those targets. When there is a lot of pressure, it becomes harder to hold on to all the professional and interpersonal niceties you would want to have," says Dr Marilyn Aitkenhead, an occupational psychologist.
Who is doing the bullying? Aitkenhead has worked with both the bullied and those accused of being bullies. She sees two main kinds of bullying behaviour in the workplace. The first she calls "humiliating manipulation", usually practised by charismatic individuals who lose their sense of empathy as they climb the greasy pole at work, are charming to their seniors but expert in secretly undermining colleagues and putting them down. The second, increasingly common type she terms "perfectionist anxiety". Typically, these are managers driven by stresses at work to place unthinking and perhaps overwhelming pressure on colleagues and subordinates, and to criticise anything less than perfect. "If you're not terribly empathic, if you're incredibly busy, if you genuinely believe that other people are performing less well than you, it is not a big step from there to start putting people down or even worse." While one in 10 bullies may be pathologically manipulative types, most, she says, can be taught to realise that their exercise of power can be experienced as abusive by others at work. Such bullying often flourishes where organisations have a laissez-faire management culture. Organisations and their leaders "need to be vigilant to take action against bullying behaviour", she says.
Of course, the glib answer may be that we all abuse power. In the debate that has followed Green's compensation, Witheridge sees everyone seeking to blame someone else. Leaders can set out all the "dignity at work" policies they like but, despite the law lords' ruling, bullying is not the sole responsibility of the boss class. "All I have heard is people blaming each other," says Witheridge. "We are all responsible for this behaviour. Every one of us is a bully, although we may not all be workplace bullies. We abuse our power every day, whether it is pushing and shoving on the train or something else. If we are not bullies at work, we may be keeping our our heads down because we don't want to get involved or we don't want to help the target of the bullying because they may have an 'illness' that will contaminate us. It's so easy to blame someone else. It's a human behaviour and the answer is within".
