In Russia, 5 to 20 percent of employees become victims of office terror.
According to experts, almost every fifth working Russian faces “mobbing” (from English mob — crowd) — psychological violence in the form of harassment of an employee in a team. As a rule, with a view to his subsequent dismissal. The result is, at best, wasted nerves and loss of work; at worst, poor health.
Office bullying is not only a Russian phenomenon. It was first studied in the early 1980s by Dr. Hanz Leyman, a Swedish psychologist. He identified as many as 45 “techniques” for making the lives of victims of mobbing unbearable: withholding the necessary information, social isolation, defamation, unfair criticism to demoralize, undermine a person's confidence in their professional competence, gossip, ridicule, shouting, etc. Over the past decades, this gentleman's set has not changed. Except that computer technology has added new opportunities to mobbing torturers. There are plenty of ways to use the victim's work computer.
Experts believe that Mobbing has great destructive power: from low self-esteem to the victim's sleep problems to nervous breakdowns, from irritability to depression and panic. Heart attacks happen. German psychiatrists, for example, estimate that mobbing causes almost 10 percent of suicides in the country.
In Western countries, the problem of office violence is taken seriously; it affects the holy holies of modern business — the philosophy of corporate relations. The corporate spirit is losing value for both victims and offenders themselves. And the deterioration of the business environment inevitably reduces labor productivity. Back in 1991, pragmatic Americans calculated that mobbing costs employers billions of dollars. These are hospital insurance payments, dismissal benefits, and legal fees. Some countries are trying to solve the problem of mobbing by law by adopting special laws on the emotional safety of employees at work. For example, Sweden has a provision for workplace harassment. To help victims of mobbing, there are telephone hotlines and public organizations in European countries, Australia and the United States that protect the rights of victims.
How relevant is the problem of mobbing for Russia? — we asked Sergey Enikolopov, Head of the Clinical Psychology Department of the Scientific Center for Mental Health of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Candidate of Psychological Sciences.
Sergey Enikolopov: In the West, more active public attention is being directed to the problem of emotional abuse. We are a little behind in this regard. In the human community, mobbing can be seen as a defense mechanism. Either because of the high professionalism and erudition of the new employee, against the background of which we are beginning to notice our own shortage of these qualities. Either because we want to live and work the way we like, as we're used to, and we don't need outsiders who threaten this status quo with their actions. Either a person, due to their individual characteristics, provokes negative emotions in us, for example, a person of a different nationality or an inveterate bachelor or a disabled person, or does not want to participate in a rush of work, or, conversely, he is used to working a lot and therefore works harder than us. In such cases, the team comes together and begins to squeeze out the unwanted.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta: Even 20 years ago, people complained that “they eat me up at work”. Has the problem become more acute?
Enikolopov: I think so. If only because in Soviet times, no matter how you feel about it, senior administrative staff had balances: party committees, trade unions, and local committees. The person who had been bullied, whether by a boss or a colleague, knew where to seek protection. And in this sense, group aggressiveness rarely took very acute forms: its organizers did not have guarantees of impunity. The administration couldn't so easily fire the person it was standing up for by the local government. Even the laziest one. We now have one vertical — “owner — manager — middle management”. And where do you look for protection? Except at the prosecutor's office...
RG: Didn't Soviet institutions even have such a strong motivation to mobbing as competition?
Enikolopov: Well, yes, back then, there were no threats such as innovations that were upending the business as usual and the distribution of income. Well, they'll give Ivan Ivanovich an extra 20 as a prize — well, let him fight for it. This carrot was not worth fighting for.
RG: Has the current crisis, with its increase in unemployment and layoffs, increased the price of carrots and the risk of becoming a victim of mobbing?
Enikolopov: So much so that today society has finally noticed this problem. Office bullying is becoming more severe, and the cost of success or failure increases dramatically. You could just be out of work. Which means losing your usual style and quality of life — yours and your family. And in a situation where the upcoming layoffs are announced, mobbing begins to increase as a tool for survival.
RG: Sergey Nikolaevich, where is mobbing more common nowadays — in government or business structures?
Enikolopov: I think they are about equal proportions when it comes to large enterprises and institutions. But in small structures, where emotional aggression is faster and more obvious — whether we accept this colleague or not — commercial interests are probably still leading. Much depends on the manager: whether he is in control of the situation, whether he allows his employees to take up arms against one of them. It's like in the army: where the unit commander strictly ensures that there is no bullying, that's not the case.
RG: Some psychologists say that female mobbing is much more sophisticated than male mobbing. If so, how do you explain this?
Enikolopov: The fact that women are more characterized by so-called indirect aggression, which is close to mobbing “technologies” — when something is done by someone else's hands — intrigues, gossip, and denunciations. Male nature, which does not exclude the ability of the stronger sex to intrigue, is still more characterized by direct aggression, a face, in other words. That is, on one side, Yago, and on the other hand, there is the evil woman Babarikha and her comrades.
RG: Who are the victims of mobbing?
Enikolopov: Both the weakest, the underdogs, and the brightest, strongest personalities. Both are “booed”. In the second scenario, this is dangerous both for the organization itself and for the state: a talented innovator will quit and go elsewhere. And the other place might be a different country.
RG: Which, in fact, is what is happening in our reality today...
Enikolopov: Here is an example with Perelman, who, however, did not stay in America. If we recall this whole story of missing prizes and medals, we can see that his depression was largely fueled by injustice on the part of the math community. Three years after he published his famous proof of the Poincare hypothesis online, two Chinese mathematicians published an article in the Asian Mathematical Journal practically appropriating his discovery. There were showdowns and international discussions between scientists: who is right? Thank God most of the world's mathematicians sided with him, and today's award of the Millennium Prize to him by the Clay Institute is an apology for everything. But there is a feeling: a group of scientists made a person lose faith in the justice of what he thinks is the fairest world of science. This is transnational mobbing.
RG: Can you give some advice to people who have faced emotional aggression from colleagues?
Enikolopov: It is difficult for a person to seek help from a psychologist, to cope with the situation of mobbing alone. Fight against low self-esteem. A person must understand that they are being made to think badly about themselves. Try not to get depressed.
And any manager, anyone, should know that this phenomenon exists. Understand its mechanisms and possible consequences. And nip any manifestations of mobbing in the bud.
Rossiyskaya Gazeta — Federal Issue No. 5139 (60) dated March 24, 2010
.png)
