Came across an interesting thread on another nursing website...where the Oregon Dept. of Environmental Quality has become the first government agency in the nation to institute a "workplace mobbing policy." Many have fallen victims to this and it will become part of the cultural vocabulary like sexual harassment and racial discrimination. The best way to describe workplace mobbing would be like comparing it to the bully on the playground who intimidated and harassed other kids to the point where they wouldn't return to the playground. In the workplace it is very similar. The goal of the mobber (ies) is to get the victim (s)fired or force them to quit.
Cultural anthropologist Noah Davenport is co-author of a book,
Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace. She says it can take the form of persistant mean behavior, persistant rudeness and persistant humiliation and the effects that it particularly has on the target that has been singled out results in stress-related physical illness such as heart disease or mental illness. She has also conducted some preliminary research on the issue and has found mobbing to be more prevalent in gov't agencies, non-profit organizations and academia, stating reasons to be due to poor management, competition for limited resources, and difficulty firing incompetent employees.
Has anyone ever been a victim to workplace mobbing?
I've seen many people fall victim to this. We've lost many good workers due to this and it's about time there's a policy implemented against such behavior.
One particular story I recall is, one nurse immediately put in a transfer to another unit b/c another nurse took eight monthly summaries from pts charts that she had just finished. How did she know it was her? Well she couldn't actually prove it, but when this nurse finally finished her last summary, she said, "Wow, thank God I'm finally finished with those summaries!!!" Guess who was at the nurses station when she said it? The other nurse who allegedly took them all out, and she was the only other nurse there. The one nurse went back to check something she had written and found no summary and she knew that she did it. Looked in another chart for another summary and no summary. All others she did were gone too. This other nurse had the reputation of doing nasty things to other employees like taking their keys and hiding them for a week or so, then acting like the hero looking like she found them, zeroing in on the new nurses, and making them feel like 2 cents, harassing other co workers to the point where they'd put in a transfer b/c they just couldn't stand it any longer. She belonged to a clique that always did nasty things to others and they actually seemed to "get off" on doing things like that. Very sick people. What drives people to be like that? It always seems that it happened to the nurses who were the most caring and the hardest workers. What's your take?
