That's men for you: Are you a workplace bully? Very few of us would admit, even to ourselves, that we are bully people. Yet bullying in the workplace is so widespread I suspect that many bullies don't actually realise what they are doing.
Of course, there are those, both men and women, who bully deliberately. They may want to get a particular person out of a job so that he or she can be replaced by one of their cronies. Or a company may have a policy of bullying people who are out of favour but who don't want to leave.
But it seems unlikely that most bullying can be explained in this way. Something else is going on. Some people bully because of their own insecurities - the victims of workplace bullies are normally people who are good at their jobs - and some because they were reared to be rude and ignorant. Some are sociopaths, which is the latest word for psychopaths.
And some, as I have said above, may not realise what they are doing. So how would you know that you were engaging in behaviour that might be experienced by another person as bullying?
Here is a checklist, based on some of the experiences of people who are bullied. If you recognise anything on it, consider whether you might be, unwittingly, behaving in a bullying fashion.
Let's start with slagging. People slag other people all the time in the workplace and that's usually okay. But is there one person who is always the butt of your jokes or everybody else's jokes?
It might all seem good-natured to you but that person might be miserable at being endlessly mocked and made little of.
Is there one person whom you reprimand and criticise a lot? Do you criticise them in front of other people? Ask yourself whether you criticise this person for behaviour that you accept from other people. If you do, then you may well be bullying that person.
Is there somebody whose holiday requests you deny more often than you deny requests from other people? Is there somebody who says you roster them more often than anyone else for unpopular shifts? Is there somebody in your department whom you regularly contact on business when they are on holidays or out sick? Perhaps the contact is justified some of the time but this behaviour can often form part of a pattern of bullying.
Who in your workplace gets left out of group activities? Who never gets invited to the pub or the Christmas party? Who is left sitting alone in the canteen? Who does nobody ever address directly in the office? Is there somebody whom nobody talks to because they once complained to management - unjustifiably in everyone's view - about being bullied? In effect, that person is now being bullied, whether or not they were bullied before.
Who is the person everyone has a laugh at, who people snigger about? What do you think it would feel like to be that person?
That these things are going on does not necessarily mean you are bullying someone but it might. If you are a person who does not want to bully anyone, but who is doing some of the things mentioned in this article, then you can choose to stop doing them.
If you bully people to get them out of a job, then I don't suppose anything I say will stop you. And if you encourage a bullying culture in your workplace then I definitely cannot stop you.
One day this sort of behaviour will start to cost organisations money in compensation and when that day comes you will either change your ways or you will be out of a job.
- For more information about bullying in the workplace, see Dignity at Work (www.dignityatwork.org/), a website established by the Amicus trade union and Britain's Department of Trade and Industry. Also visit the website of the Anti-Bullying Centre (www.abc.tcd.ie/) of Trinity College Dublin.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.