Violence in its different forms of presentation is unfortunately an increasingly frequent phenomenon in our society. In this sense, workplace harassment, also called mobbing, is a form of violence that was recognized as such for a relatively short time, however, it has seriously affected the working life and professional development of a large part of the employed population, also causing serious consequences on the physical and emotional health of the people who suffer from it.
Within this framework, the new demands for companies in the globalized environment demand greater speed and flexibility, which produces work organization formulas that affect employees at certain times. Thus, at present, fear of job loss causes workers to endure complex situations in their work environment. And around this, mobbing is directly proportional to job stability, therefore, precarious working conditions are a critical basis for the appearance of harassment practices in the organization. (University of Valladolid, sf)
It should be noted that mobbing is a series of "clandestine" acts, which are not characterized by a specific behavior but by a finalist behavior sustained over time. Unfortunately, in a work environment it is not uncommon to observe this phenomenon through the submission and constant denigration to which some collaborators are immersed, by one or more of their colleagues. Such is the case of the workplace harassment figures in Mexico, which according to various statistics, it has been stipulated that around 44% of the professional population has suffered some type of harassment or mobbing with the aim of achieving the abandonment of their job as a work or self-elimination. (Belmont, 2014)
What is mobbing or laboral harassment?
The term mobbing from the English verb to mob, which in its translation into Spanish means “to attack with violence”; comes from ethology, science that studies the behavior of animals. But above all, this term emanates from the field of ornithology that is dedicated to the study of birds, in which the defensive behavior observed in a group of small birds has been analyzed, which consists of the continuous harassment of a larger enemy, often a bird of prey, with the purpose of achieving the flight or death of the animal harassed by several others. (Mendez, sf)
The doctor in occupational psychology and professor at the University of Stockholm, Heinz Leymann, investigated such a phenomenon presented in birds in the 1980s and was the first to define this term during a conference on hygiene and safety at work in the year 1990 to refer to workplace harassment: «Situation in which a person exercises extreme psychological violence, systematically and recurrently and for a long time, against another person or persons in the workplace in order to destroy the networks of communication of the victim or victims, destroy their reputation, disrupt the performance of their work and finally make that person or people leave the workplace. (Universia España, nd)
Thus, currently mobbing, also known as workplace harassment or moral harassment, is the action of a stalker or stalkers on a victim, in order to produce fear towards their workplace, and receiving the victim, unjustified psychological violence manifested to through hostile acts such as insults, rumors, emptiness, among others; prolonged for months or even years and, in the most serious cases, involves physical or sexual violence.
Therefore, mobbing can be defined as any abusive behavior carried out in a conscious, repetitive and premeditated manner, which threatens the dignity and physical or psychological integrity of the affected person, in order to get them to leave their job or worsen your work climate. (Government of Chile, 2007)
The ultimate goal of mobbing is usually to get the victim to abandon the job, since this is considered a threat to the personal interests of the harasser or stalkers. In this case, the harassment is regularly exercised by superiors in a hierarchical level, in order to expel the victim from the company, without an economic cost; and by the work collaborators themselves, by the need for control, ambition and destruction of the individual. (The mobbing, sf)
Meanwhile, for a situation of harassment to be considered as mobbing, it is required that it be a conscious behavior, which aims to reduce the esteem or abilities of the person in their work position to eliminate them from the group and to maintain the frequency bullying at least weekly, for an extended period of time. Being some of the behaviors that are exerted on a person harassed at work, the following:
Attacks on the victim through organizational measures : Refusal to recognize their worth, inferior treatment to other collaborators, work overload or, on the contrary, assigning tasks of little value, leaving them without work or stealing important documents, denying them training necessary to perform their duties, be subject to disciplinary measures for insignificant or fabricated causes, etc.
Attacks on the victim through social isolation: Being separated or marginalized from other collaborators or colleagues, being humiliated or criticized, distorting their words or behaviors, among others.
Attacks on privacy: Denying you leave or vacations, being teased about your private life.
Very serious situations: Harassment or sexual violence and physical violence either on objects, for example: throwing things, slamming doors, etc., or on the victim herself. (Knight, 2005)
Causes of mobbing
According to various studies carried out, mobbing tends to arise as a result of professional jealousy and envy that the harassed person arouses with their skills, that is, most of the harassed are brilliant people at their work, thereby causing the harasser to fear for remaining in their shadow or the fear that their professional deficiencies will be exposed after comparison.
Meanwhile, the harasser often considers that the harassed person is endangering not only their job, but that of the entire group. And faced with such circumstances, they tend to be animated by a sense of justice, according to which their actions are not driven by fear or envy, but by the desire to protect the entire group. (Marín, sf)
However, moral harassment or mobbing presents great difficulties in its approach, since there is still no clear consensus on what it constitutes. And in any case, most of the definitions of this concept share three elements to consider:
- Mobbing is defined in terms that refer to its effect on the victim and not on the intention of the aggressor or aggressor. For workplace harassment to be considered as such, there must be a negative consequence on the victim and the aggressor behavior must be persistent.
Types of mobbing according to the structure of the organization
Not all workplace harassment situations are the same, since the actions exercised by the harasser largely depend on the hierarchical level in which both the harasser and the victim are within the company. Thus, taking into account these considerations, three types of mobbing are stipulated (El mobbing, 2011):
Descending: It is the most common type of harassment, in which the harasser is a person who holds power and the harassed is one of his subordinates. This variant of workplace harassment may be due, among other causes, to the boss's despotic personality, the practice of non-transparent activities with which the victim does not agree, an attempt to force the voluntary resignation of the employee so as not to have to bear the costs of an unfair dismissal, or to place a friend in his position, the destruction of someone more competent that endangers the position of the boss, or even disagreements in political or religious ideas.
Horizontal: In this type of mobbing, the victim is a worker harassed by one or more colleagues of the same hierarchical level, mainly due to purely personal problems, a perception of the harassed as someone different or threatening to others, or the resistance of the harassed to accept the group's guidelines and codes. However, normally, although the harasser is of the same level, they usually have a real power superior to that of the harassed, either because of their contacts and relationships or because of their influence.
Ascending: It is the less common type of harassment, in which one or more subordinates harass a boss or superior. Generally, this type of harassment occurs when a company, with a group already formed, comes to an external superior and the workers question their methods and style of command. Either due to the ambition of one of the stalkers for that specific position, even the fear of their own continuity if the current boss does not agree with their traditional way of working. Also, this type of mobbing can happen if the new boss is someone who has been promoted and whose new status is not accepted by those who were his former colleagues.
Types of mobbing according to their objectives
In addition to the classification of mobbing according to the hierarchical position of the harasser and the victim within the company, there is also a classification of harassment, considering the objectives that the aggressor intends to achieve with his harassment actions:
Strategic: The objective of this type of harassment is to get the victim to leave his job, without incurring the company in the obligation to pay the compensation that would correspond to an unfair dismissal. Some companies carry out this type of harassment in a systematic way, that is, they hire a worker to benefit from his function and later harass him until he leaves, to recruit a new employee under the same conditions and with the same benefits.
Management: One of the objectives of this type of mobbing is to obtain the voluntary resignation of a worker who does not meet the expectations of the boss, either because he does not submit or because he is too bright and can expose him. Likewise, another objective of this type of harassment is to increase the performance of the workers and the profits of the company through fear, regularly carried out by managers without leadership skills or the ability to motivate their employees.
Perverse: This type of bullying has practically no specific objective, since it is based on the needs of the unhealthy personality of the bully to feel that it has power over the people or the group.
Disciplinary: This type of harassment is intended for the victim to bend to the will of the harasser, especially if he is performing fraudulent or unclear maneuvers. It is used mainly to achieve the voluntary resignation of people with excessive absenteeism or pregnant women. (The mobbing, 2011)
Other disorders
On many occasions, mobbing is confused with another disorder called burn-out or
“Burnout syndrome”, which refers to the wear and tear suffered by a person due to the specific circumstances of their function or activity in the company, for example, excess workload due to production circumstances, excessive hours worked, work environment complicated by some conflict presented; or due to specific characteristics of the position, such as jobs that require full attention, highly competitive work environments, etc. Being all these circumstances of intense emotional and psychological activity. Therefore, mobbing is also confused with work stress. However, stress is caused by the characteristics of the job and the interpretation that the affected person perpetrates them.
It is important to consider that the social rejection for which a person is ignored but not persecuted, the stress generated by work under pressure or highly competitive environments, the existence of conflicts with colleagues, the work coordinated with a boss with a complicated personality, either Authoritarian, demanding or perfectionist and other conflictive work situations due to differences of interests, are NOT considered mobbing or workplace harassment practices. (López, 2015)
Consequences of mobbing for the company
Certain forms of work organization are more susceptible to the presentation of this phenomenon of harassment by their collaborators. In general, strongly bureaucratic organizations, with a higher degree of rigidity and / or disorganization, seem to be more vulnerable to the appearance of harassing behaviors among their members.
Therefore, it can be noted that the sectors in which the most cases of workplace harassment occur are the public administration, social security institutions and educational institutions, followed by the media and certain “ideological” associations such as political parties, for example, in which harassment occurs mainly due to the impossibility of expelling a member, either because he is a public official or because his prestige and capacity for work make dismissal inadmissible. (From Miguel & Prieto, 2016)
As already stipulated, mobbing can be motivated by jealousy, envy, competition or promotion, by the incorporation of new collaborators, by satisfying the insatiable need to attack, control and destroy that bullies present; or even just by the presence of the victim, because their differential characteristics produce in the bullies a series of unconscious reactions caused by their own psychological problems. (Vidal, sf)
Thus, being mobbing a degenerative phenomenon, that is, as time passes, it accentuates and increases, the negative consequences of its practices not only affect the victim, but also the entire organization, presenting various effects such as:
Loss of productivity: Caused by reduced performance and sick leave of harassed workers. And the lack of attention on the part of the harasser to issues of real importance in the organization.
Deterioration of the work environment: Harassment situations, especially if they are continuous and systematic, cause a negative environment in which fear and mistrust prevail. Employees, therefore, decrease their motivation and ability to cooperate and work as a team.
In this way, after not feeling identified with the company, they look for a better place to work and develop, inducing a higher staff turnover and an increase in the respective costs of recruitment, selection, hiring and training of staff.
Increased accident rate: Lack of concentration and anxiety cause loss of attention that can trigger serious workplace accidents.
Deterioration of the image of the company: In those companies in which their workers are mostly concerned about workplace harassment, so they pay less attention to the production of the items or services that have been assigned to them; worse quality is obtained, the entire production process being affected, causing loss of prestige and, of course, of clients for the company. (The mobbing, nd)
conclusion
Mobbing occurs in highly hierarchical workplaces and in environments where there is devastating competitiveness, with a chaotic organization and where hierarchies are not well defined. Likewise, for there to be mobbing, it is necessary that there be complicit silence of the collaborators in the companies, cruelty and even self-incrimination of the victim, who by ignoring why she is attacked, initially assumes the aggressions to which she is the object as pertinent. Therefore, it is necessary to combat this growing phenomenon that produces various alterations on the psychological and physical plane, in the family, work and social context.
Currently there is no specific regulation of workplace harassment, however, there are some avenues that can be used by victims to obtain a sanction for the harasser and to obtain reparation for moral damage. Thus, in 2014, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation in Mexico established criteria to prove that a worker is a victim of mobbing. In this way, those who wish to demonstrate such circumstances must prove that the objective they had against them was to intimidate, intimidate or consume the plaintiff emotionally or intellectually, with a view to excluding him from the organization or satisfying the need to attack, control or destroy, by the harasser.This is so that the behaviors that make up workplace harassment can generate damages or affectations that can be claimed through criminal, administrative, civil or labor channels, in accordance with the claim that the affected party demands. (Olivares, 2014)
However, in the prevailing environment of individualism and after the lack of a culture of labor integration, these mechanisms become insufficient and ineffective, if true awareness of the damage caused to the personal and professional development of workers is not generated. and, therefore, in the proper functioning of companies.
References
- Belmont, MT (2014). Harassment and work history a problem that generates inequality in the organizational culture. México, DF: Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences. Caballero, J. (2005). Psychological Harassment at work: Mobbing. Paceña Magazine of Family Medicine, 132 - 138. De Miguel, V., & Prieto, J. (September 25, 2016). Scielo. Obtained from http://www.scielo.org.bo/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1994-37332016000200003&lng=es&nrm=iso The mobbing. (sf). Obtained from http://www.elmobbing.com/consentación-para-laempresa-mobbing-acoso-laboral El mobbing. (June 27, 2011). Obtained from http://www.elmobbing.com/tiposmobbing-acoso-laboral-estructura-organizacion El mobbing. (sf). Obtained from http://www.elmobbing.com/que-es-acoso-laboralG Gobierno de Chile. (2007). Workplace harassment or mobbing.Santiago de Chile: Labor Directorate López, I. (May 22, 2015). Obtained from Occupational risk prevention: http://prldawlaguna.blogspot.mx/2015_05_01_archive.html?view=classicMarín, J. (sf). The impact of mobbing on the work performance of three young women from a commercial company in Martínez de la Torre, Ver. Martínez de la Torre, Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana.Méndez, F. (nd). Security Forum. Retrieved from http://www.forodeseguridad.com/artic/rrhh/7020.htmOlivares, E. (December 28, 2014). The Day. UNAM. Obtained from http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/12/28/sociedad/030n1soc Union of Employees of the Justice of the Argentine Nation. (June 29, 2015). Obtained from http://www.uejn.org.ar/ayuda-contra-el-acoso-laboral-2008Universia España. (sf). Obtained from http: //www.universia.es / mobbing / mobbing-acosopsicologico / at / 1121950Universidad de Valladolid. (sf). Labor relations and human resources. Retrieved from https://uvadoc.uva.es/bitstream/10324/1827/1/TFG-L80.pdfVela, A. (June 26, 2015). ICTs and Training. Obtained from https://ticsyformacion.com/2015/06/26/algunas-causas-del-mobbing-infografiainfographic-rrhh/Vidal, M. d. (sf). Mobbing at work. Its problematic.. Valencia, Spain: Faculty of Pharmacy.Pharmacy faculty.Pharmacy faculty.
Thanks
Special thanks to the research professor Fernando Aguirre y Hernández, professor of the master's degree in administrative engineering attached to the Orizaba Technological Institute, for the technical contribution to the construction of this article and its direction in the process of learning systemic thinking. Likewise, to the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt) dedicated to promoting and stimulating the development of science and technology in Mexico, for financial support for postgraduate studies.
Ethology: Branch of biology and experimental psychology that studies the behavior of animals in their natural environments, in freedom or in laboratory conditions. Scientists dedicated to ethology study the distinctive behavioral characteristics of a given group and how these evolve for the survival of the same in a given environment.
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