Can we fix the damage caused by workplace bullying?

For more than a decade I have been researching aspects of workplace bullying – that widespread and scurrilous set of activities where those in power (about 75% of perpetrators are managers and supervisors) attack, demean, demand or destroy their subordinates. It occurs often enough that it is deemed costly, although academic assessments of employees experiencing bullying vary from 5% to over 50% in the last year. Workplace bullying is not new – Dickens offers some excellent examples of bullying, but it has become more widespread and more insidious in recent decades – perhaps reflecting changes in management practices and managerial prerogative, larger workplaces and greater pressures on labour productivity. Over those ten years of gathering data and surveying workplace bullying, I have all the while held hopes of completing a scholarly and useful research project called “Workplace Bullying - Fight, Flight or Fix?”