WHY are nurses so catty??

Artis · May 22, 2005

All it takes is a little kindness. Its very easy.

You know, though, there are different power dynamics at work in your sister's situation. An attorney of any status in a law firm has a lot more power over the clerical staff than one new staff nurse does anywhere.
Cattiness and pettiness are endemic in areas where people feel powerless and trapped, so they build themselves up by tearing others down. It's sickening, and nurses do practice it to the nth degree, especially on hospital units (big reason why I'm no longer employed in acute care settings). It ceratinly is not unique to nursing. I've spent a lot of time working in family literacy programs, you'd think the women there would be supportive of each other given all they've been through, but noooooooo. Can't wait to start ripping each other apart at the slightest provocation.
I guess the only thing I would say is that YOU can't control anyone's behavior, only how you react to it and what you do about it. If someone is a jerk, it's a reflection on them, not you. I don't understand, in this era of the nursing shortage, why nurses choose to stay in jobs where they are abused and unhappy when they don't need to.

nursemike, ASN, RN · May 22, 2005

I do think the root of passive/aggressive behavior is passivity. If you feel like you have to take crap from someone (doctors, patients, other nurses, management--whoever) there's a strong temptation to pass it along to the first available victim (a newer nurse, an aide--whoever). In my experience, the biggest bullies are also the biggest boot-lickers--very committed to a hierarchy.

I also agree that management has a great deal of responsibility for establishing and maintaining a healthy work environment. But as important as top-down solutions are, I think the best hope is bottom-up. We simply have to make a choice not to play these games, not to let ourselves be victimized by them, and not to victimize anyone else. And I think we need to realize that we aren't talking about "nice," we're talking about what it takes to make our jobs bearable. I don't for a moment imagine this will be easy, but I am increasingly persuaded that it's necessary.

nurse_ange1 · May 22, 2005

Just brainstorming here:
3. To get *into* nursing school, you have to be very very competitive. You don't get in, unless you are fairly driven to succeed as a nurse, this would tend to select a group that is almost tailor-made for young-eating. It kind of reminds me of chickens. If a chicken sees another chicken with a speck of blood (or something red) on it, that chicken will come and peck the red spot, and other chickens will come and peck too, until the injured chicken is killed, or nearly killed. Does this promote the survival of the fittest, or the survival of the meanest?

Do a article search on "horizontal violence." Yes part of the problem is that most of us are women, and yes most of us are slightly anal retentive, driven and a bit competative, and our job demands perfection BUT we are all human beings and ought to be treated with some degree of professionalism if as a profession we want to be treated as PROFESSIONALS. The goal is to stop the cycle of abuse. Don't be part of it, don't tolerate it, and kill 'em with kindness. It will irritate them to no end. (yes I have personal experience on that one). :rotfl:

Many of could nurses have been run off by "battle axes" who think they know everything and "own the unit, the agency, the shift, etc." Its so sad they have nothing better to look for in their lives than to make some other nurse feel like **it. :crying2:

kadokin, ASN, RN · May 22, 2005

yep yep..cattiness knows no bounds..be it race,gender,profession,ect...
This was the last post and that is the reason I chose to reply. Nothing personal against the author. Enjoy this article.
UNDERSTANDING WORK ABUSE:
VIOLATING HUMAN NEEDS AT WORK
by Judith Wyatt. There is no copyright on this paper. Use it as you wish, but please credit the author and reference this Web site. Also, please reference our book, Work Abuse: How To Recognize and Survive It, which has more complete information.
Speaking as a nurse and a mental health professional, Bravo! Thank you for helping to expose an umentionable but monstrous problem in our society. You have my support.
Psychiatrists, other mental health professionals, managers, union leaders, and anyone who works--that includes almost all of us--need to understand, in even greater depth than before, how and why people are becoming mentally and physically ill and drug addicted, as a result of the work they do daily. The term "work abuse" describes emotional abuse of workers in dysfunctional work institutions. As outlined in this paper, "work abuse" is parallel to, and often causes, child abuse in dysfunctional families.
Up to now, "work stress" has been a euphemism for most work abuse. Stress becomes abuse when we understand that stress may be the direct result of managerial practices perpetrated for the purpose of unnecessary control at the expense of workers' health and productivity. Perceptive and responsible mental health professionals are beginning to see quite clearly that abusive work--brought about by authoritarian work structures--is a major reason for the current failure of our institutions to meet public needs.
Wherever participative work has been introduced in this country and abroad, stress has been reduced, abuse nearly eliminated and productivity increased. Inevitably, participation will have to replace authoritarianism in America's workplaces in order to eliminate abuse and for our institutions to become effective and worthy of our trust.
But until healthy participative work cultures happen, psychiatrists and unionists have an increasing responsibility to assist their patients and members to survive the abusive work they now face daily. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals must start now to intervene in authoritarian workplaces on behalf of their clients; union leaders must take responsibility for the mental health of their members rather than ignoring abuse issues; and managers must begin to find other ways to fulfill their own needs than to overcontrol working people in an authoritarian manner.
WHAT IS "WORK ABUSE?"
"Work abuse" is the brutalizing and dehumanizing of a person through patterned ways of interacting at work. This includes systematic denial that emotional abuse is happening. The interactions are determined by a "work culture"--a set of unconscious rules, or "norms," about how things are done, what is allowed or not allowed, and what is, or is not, faced openly and talked about.
Work abuse can affect a whole organization, a work group within the organization--or it can be focused on one individual, the scapegoat for the department. The scapegoat takes the focused blame and negative feelings, the abuse, of everyone. When the scapegoated person inevitably leaves or is fired, someone else may be selected by the group to fill the slot. Sometimes an entire office or department performs the scapegoat function, the negativity sink, for the organization.
Hypnotic Denial Keeps Abuse Hidden
Work culture rules are mirrors of unconscious rules of interaction in a family. Abused employees feel to blame for feeling abused, the same as a dysfunctional family makes the kids feel bad and crazy for dad's abusive behavior at home. Worst of all, a work culture is hypnotic--it defines how employees see reality.
Abused employees cope in the same way as abused children, by going numb--they enter a hypnotic trance that denies the pain by seeing the situation as impossible. Employees enter the hypnotic trance of protective denial as they get off the elevator at work each morning.
Employees in denial about their abuse often end up with illness: addictions, depression, violent behavior. Then they feel guilty about--and they are blamed for--having to take time off from work to treat the symptoms.
How Work Abuse Causes Mental Health Problems
How does work abuse affect mental health? Like overkill, work abuse effectively creates stress through 5 levels of assault: (l) the abuse itself, (2) the inability to protest it, (3) being blamed and feeling guilty for reacting against it, (4) having to live in denial of all of this, (5) feeling guilty for the symptoms that then develop and further disrupt the employee's functioning.
WORK ABUSE: SOCIAL ISSUE LONG IGNORED
Work abuse is an epidemic; the vast majority of workplaces are still abusive when they don't have to be. Attitudes like "paying your dues," "just a way to pay the bills," and "TGIF" are too familiar. The truth is that we, as a society, have long expected work to be a miserable experience most of the time. Just as in the 19th century it was the norm to think of healthy child-rearing as crushing a child's spirit, it's been the norm for work to be a form of punishment we escape from gladly.
It's a positive sign that workplace opinion polls have been showing a steady trend toward more working people choosing job satisfaction over money and security. It follows that what we expect for our children we are just beginning to want for ourselves: more humane treatment.
Cranks, Troublemakers and Disgruntled Employees
Isn't it just the cranks and troublemakers who end up with work disabilities? If it's really so bad, why do so few complain--and these we call "disgruntled employees"? We can not overstress the degree of denial that exists around this issue. Like alcoholics and victims of child abuse, people can not afford to be aware of the amount of pain they carry and the lack of options they see for resolving it, and still get themselves up and to work each morning.
In the same way, entire organizations must deny their fear-ridden work cultures. Work cultures can be healthy, but many are sick and headed by managers who need unempowered workers in order to feel superior. Those marginal employees who "can't take the heat" of the sick culture become physically or mentally ill. Marginal employees--often the most sensitive persons--become the scapegoats within systems that can't face their sick cultures openly.
The Healthiest Employees Become the Troubled Employees
Douglas LaBier, at Harvard's Project on Technology, Work And Character, reports that the people with the highest sense of responsibility and imagination end up being "troublemakers" in many workplaces. At first they may be the most disciplined and productive of employees, with high performance records. However, the same qualities that make them productive employees make them protest inefficient and degrading work norms. They end up with conflicts and symptoms because they can't remain sane in an insane system without being seen as deviants.
LaBier's book, Modern Madness: The Emotional Fallout of Success, 1986, documents the victimization of the best people in our work organizations, and the massive denial about it.
Workplace Violence
It is becoming more and more common to read headlines about incidents of work related murders. Because of the denial around work abuse, these acts are explained away as personal life crises of seriously disturbed people. The work issues involved are minimized, if not totally ignored.
It's true that there are many "seriously disturbed" people in the workforce who must earn a living. These people can function normally if put in an environment that brings out the best in them, rather than one that reinforces the abuse they experienced growing up.
We have had more than one client come to us at the end of their rope, tempted to act out violently because the system offered them no way to address conflict. Methods do exist for resolving work conflicts openly, creatively and positively for all involved. But the tragedy is that many do not expect to have their conflicts resolved, because they are used to living with abuse. They usually remain in conflict ridden job situations until they self-destruct through disabling physical illness, mental breakdown, addictive behavior or violence.
Work Abuse is a Major Hidden Cause of the Dysfunctional Family.
Parents, especially fathers, trapped and helpless in their jobs, may come home and abuse their children or batter their wives. Employees who act out abusively at home are seen as insensitive and power-hungry, as dominators and abusers, by the public, their families, the helping professions, and even themselves. The connection between being abused at work and abusing family members is largely denied.
One exception was family therapist Virginia Satir who was interviewed about the abuse issue shortly before her death. She asked the interviewer rhetorically, "How many people really like what happens to them at work? I'd like to know!" She made the connection between dad being abused at work and coming home and abusing the family because he can't be heard at work. Satir pointed out dad can't be heard because of authoritarian managers needing to control him in order to relieve shame feelings inside themselves. "It's clinically correct that people who abuse power are feeling weak inside," she said.
As a society, we ask men and women to subject themselves to demeaning environments where they can't afford to be sensitive. We ignore the daily violence done against them. Then we expect them to come home and be loving fathers and mothers. How can we blame them when the society is presently taking no responsibility for maintaining the workplaces that treat them with violence and train them in numbness? When psychiatrists, counselors, union leaders and enlightened managers take on the responsibility of assisting abused employees, we can expect family relationships to improve.
The Federal Work System is Abusive
One counselor in another clinic said about one of our clients, who had quit a job at a large corporation because of abuse: "60,000 people work there, and 60,000 people can't be wrong."
The shocking reality is that 60,000 people can be wrong, and often are. As one outstanding example of this, we have seen first hand and documented how the inefficiency that pervades the federal government, and incenses the public and Congress, is the direct product of an abusive work culture of two million federal employees.
The authoritarian run Postal Service, one of the most abusive agencies, is expected to deliver mail while being the prime scapegoat for both business and the public. It is a miracle that less than 5% of first class mail is misdelivered. In the Service's drive to "increase productivity," mail handlers are pushed beyond human limits with nowhere to go to be heard.
As early as 1980, Michael Maccoby, a Harvard University organization psychologist, announced that most federal agencies are openly abusive. In one report summarizing his studies at the Commerce Department, he said, "The system brings out the worst, rather than the best in federal employees."
In 1985, Robert F. Allen, organization psychologist who has worked with more than 400 organizations, reported to the House Human Resources Subcommittee about the massive abuse in government causing low productivity. "Federal employees want to do a good job but they can't," he reported. He said that abusive negative norms prevented feds from doing their job.
So far Congress has done nothing about feds' low productivity stemming from the wide-spread abuse. Congresspeople themselves are trapped in the abusive federal work culture. They have to be educated in depth to face their denial about their own norms of fear and blame.
Ineffective Institutions Linked to Work Abuse
Failure of our institutions comes from the fact that employees in these institutions experience abusive work every day. Most institutional norms prohibit employees from taking initiative, from solving problems so they don't recur, and from drawing attention to inadequacies so that the inadequacies can be corrected. Instead, employees are rewarded for protecting their turf, jockeying for a new position, and "covering your ***." This happens because of the survival fear inherent in the ruthless jungle fighting of authoritarian environments.
Abusive jungle fighting in large corporations, and in state and federal governments, threatens the planet. As recent occurrences prove, engineers and scientists in these institutions are prevented from pointing out errors that may cause lives to be lost. The Challenger and Three Mile Island disasters are but two of many incidents linked to norms of silence in authoritarian work structures. Collaborative work environments could have prevented these incidents by encouraging oversights to be spoken about openly before the accidents happened.
A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE
Why haven't we been hearing about work abuse the way we've heard about child abuse? The conspiracy of silence has two major causes:
1) Overcontrol by Authoritarian Managers
The first is that in this country 95% of employers sustain--and deny--abusive work cultures to support a management doctrine of authoritarian over-control and motivation by fear. The hard line methods are so prevalent that training texts in top American business schools state outright that a good manager keeps a tight authoritarian grip on employees.
Business schools and business publications are power oriented. They foster a sense of power entitlement in managers. Many managers want to believe as they are taught, that people lower down the hierarchy are less able and worthy of development and participation in decison-making. They believe it because as individuals they want the power themselves in order to meet their misplaced esteem needs.
Why are managers power hungry? As explained in psychology text books, persons ignored and shamed in childhood often learn to grasp for power in order to ward off inner feelings of worthlessness and humiliation. As hard as it may be to believe, many, if not most, top and mid-level managers need their power image so they can feel OK about themselves inside.
To ward off these inner shame feelings, many managers fight vigorously to defeat employee involvement programs introduced by their organizations--with the result of lost productivity and profit. Understandably, managers, who use emotional abuse of employees to maintain privilege and control, do not want the issue raised to the public. This is especially true for high visibility public agency heads.
News media employees are in denial because abuse is inherent in their own work structures. An example of how denial works in the media: a reporter for a daily newspaper contacted us about interviewing our clients for an article on work abuse. "How do we know they are not just disgruntled employees?" the reporter asked. The question revealed her denial bias. We didn't let the story be published because it would have exposed our clients to further abuse.
2) Survival Needs of Victims
The second reason for silence about work abuse comes out of the survival needs of the victims. The depth of the abuse problem creates massive hopelessness in employees. And the hopelessness must be covered by denial. No one can continue to function at work at all if they openly face their pain and hopelessness about it. The pain would be too great. And few can believe in their own experience of abuse, because they are surrounded by denial on all sides.
Denial can be so strong that abused employees will actively defeat efforts to relieve their abuse. A group of low level employees in one federal agency torpedoed a project aimed at improving the work situation. Explaining his anti-improvement attitude, one member of the group said, "This is a hoax; things will never change around here. Why raise our hopes?"
This reinforced helplessness and denial totally undermines the personal responsibility of the victim to exercise control over his or her own life. It represents a failure of responsibility by employers and helping professionals who contribute to the denial without realizing it.
Work Abuse is Overlooked as an Issue in Most Counseling
Many clients come to therapy to work on relationship issues. What happens is that they ignore their work abuse issue which may be just as large. Both they and their therapists believe the work problem has no solution, so they don't look at it.
Clients may come to therapy with the symptoms of drug abuse or violence, and, with the tacit agreement of the counselor, ignore the causes in the workplace. Counselors and clients blame the clients' family histories for their inability to tolerate their work problems. It is an assumption in our society that you should be able to endure debilitating work situations because "the world doesn't owe you a living," and there is something wrong with you if you can't.
Denial by Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Counselors
Hopelessness and denial is as strong among helping professionals as it is among working people. Many professionals, who themselves have escaped abusive workplaces to enter private practice, overlook the issue because it's often too painful for them to see. They fail to see the impact of workplace dysfunction on their patients--and they don't see it as valid or feasible problem for therapy to address.
Mental health professionals' own hopelessness, and lack of education on how workplace dynamics affects their patients, help seal the trap from which their work abused patients can't escape. Professional therapists rationalize their inability to help their patients with abusive work. They prefer to see the inner world and the outer world of their patients as two separate and unrelated realities.
One exception is a highly regarded psychologist, Will Schutz, who reported on a recent radio interview, "America is supposed to be a free country, but actually the corporate workplace makes it among the most repressive countries in the world." Schutz has introduced "concordance," his name for employee involvement, into a number of companies. Schutz points out he has hardly made a dent because the problem is prodigious.
Stress Reduction: Bailing Out a Leaking Boat
What options are left a person who has to spend the major portion of her or his life in one or another of these abusive organizations? Answer: at present, not much. Because less than 5% of work environments are non-abusive, those who decide to quit their jobs often get on a merry-go-round of going from one bad situation to another.
Often such employees get more depressed, desperate and self-blaming as they go. Or they go for stress reduction: bailing out the leaking boat. What good is it to relax while being abused? How is it different from the children who learn to dissociate from their bodies while being battered?
Many people simply can't quit their jobs because of the pressure of family obligations. This leaves most workers virtually imprisoned in abusive situations. Until work cultures change drastically, workers' greatest relief will come from recognizing the abuse and getting help to deal with it on an individual basis, from mental health professionals who are trained to deal with work abuse.
EXAMPLE CASES OF WORK ABUSE
These are three typical cases from three typically abusive work environments.
Oil Refinery
Sam was a black shift worker in a large oil refinery. He had a flawless 10-year performance record. When he got a new black supervisor who was threatened by his initiative, everything went downhill for Sam.
In the refinery's authoritarian competitive work culture, people were rewarded for power plays, to get ahead by replacing or edging someone else out of their territory. The supervisor, acting within these norms, subtly scapegoated Sam to keep Sam down. The supervisor harassed Sam by rigid enforcement of rules that others in the work group were allowed to relax.
Sam had nowhere to appeal his predicament. No one was willing to face the fact that competition norms affect black people as well as white. The norms were not to address conflict openly and not to challenge legitimized authority. Sam's extra work burden, combined with the discrimination and isolation in the work group, caused severe panic attacks. One panic attack caused Sam to have an auto accident.
Sam was off work because of stress disability; then he lost his job. Sam was isolated and alone. He suffered post traumatic stress disorder symptoms because no one could understand or help him with his no-win bind. Sam lost both his wife and his home because he couldn't get another job.
Social Service Agency
Sara was a social worker in an agency for a chronically dysfunctional population. Her agency, like many of its kind, had a work culture that elevated the needs of the patients, while denigrating the needs of the staff. Staff worked to the edge of burnout.
Staff were told to express needs openly; however, they were treated as weak and inadequate if they dared to complain or set limits on the workload. In addition, the director established a competitive backbiting norm by badmouthing one employee to another in private. Sara was pushed to produce at an impossible standard. As Sara became more and more burned out, she believed she was inadequate because she couldn't keep up the pace.
She turned against fellow employees who ideally might have supported her in protesting the overwork. Later she learned that everyone doing her job felt the same bind. She left the job to look for another; she found one, but the new job was as abusive as the old.
Federal Enforcement Agency
Finally, take the case of Clarence, who was an engineer in a federal enforcement agency. Clarence had recently completed graduate work in organizational psychology paid for by the government. He began a new assignment with high ideals and initiative. He soon discovered that his agency's adversarial norms for dealing with partner agencies was keeping essential tasks from being accomplished.
With two co-workers he was able to design and implement a collaborative approach to problem-solving with the partner agencies. Collaboration was productive to all involved. Suddenly, federal management shut down the project, separated Clarence and his two co-workers and reassigned Clarence to rote work. The federal managers were into power and visibility for themselves; they were more comfortable with dictating to, than collaborating with, lower level agencies.
Like 99% of government agencies, this one had strong norms against employees taking initiative. The more Clarence tried to protest or address this issue, the more he was ostracized as a troublemaker. Clarence became increasingly resentful and depressed from his inability to use his talents, get his job done, or address the truth at work.
Then one morning Clarence was suddenly fired for "undermining the authority of the agency." He was offered a large lump sum by the agency not to proceed with an appeal of the firing that was an obvious set-up. Clarence accepted the money because he was experiencing post traumatic stress disorder from three years of abusive treatment at the agency. The public lost a dedicated public employee and the cash the agency paid to keep Clarence quiet.
PREVENTING AND TREATING WORK ABUSE
How can we prevent and treat work abuse? There are three facets to resolving the problem of work abuse. All depend on breaking through the public denial around this issue and legitimizing it as a crucial, deep-rooted cause of social and personal problems. Solutions do exist, but they will never be put into widespread practice in the current climate of denial.
Mental Health Professionals Alerted
First, mental health professionals must become aware of work abuse as a hidden issue behind much personal and family dysfunction, and how to detect it. Systems oriented family therapists and counselors need to be trained in our work culture model in order to help their clients deal with abuse at work. Therapists with organization experience must be trained as employee advocates who can intervene in the workplace on behalf of clients, in order to mediate conflicts in a non-adversarial manner.
Mental health interventions begin with counseling for survivors. The approach is similar to treating war survivors of post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). We are using our own model for validating and empowering the victim to understand how the work culture affects him or her and how to act effectively on her or his own behalf within the organization.
Psychiatrists who handle stress disability cases must be educated on the behavioral dynamics of the workplace that are the cause of stress. They must learn to make recommendations for behavioral mediations in the workplace as a normal part of their treatment. Work and Family Resources can assist psychiatrists to understand workplace dynamics and make recommendations that will enable their clients to cope at work.
Psychiatrists Can Have Immediate Impact To Alleviate Abusive Work
Psychiatrists must awaken now to how they are being used by management to expel work abused employees. Flushing scapegoated employees down the disability chute with the stamp of approval by psychiatrists is a major way "misfits" are purged from dysfunctional organizations. This allows organizations to continue abusive practices, while management is confirmed in its belief that the problem is with specific individuals rather than the abusive work environment. Instead, psychiatrists must begin to advise organizations of the need to stop emotional abuse of their employees at work.
In the case of Sam the refinery worker mentioned earlier, the company's evaluating psychiatrist misunderstood Sam's predicament. He blamed Sam for not being able to cope and he would not confront the oil company. He pronounced Sam unfit for work when Sam's disability ran out. When Sam protested, the psychiatrist advised Sam, "Get a good lawyer!" Instead, the psychiatrist could have had a positive impact on all of the oil company's employees by advising the company of the abusive work environment and explaining to the company Sam's no-win situation. This would have saved Sam's job, and prevented breakup of his family and loss of his home.
Often we have been unable to convince psychiatrists of their responsbility to our mutual clients because of the psychiatrists' strong belief that the employer can't be wrong. Psychiatrists are trained to be gatekeepers upholding conventional norms that sustain authoritarian work practices. Many psychiatrists uphold managerial prerogative values because they share these values. We need heartful participative psychiatrists, just as we need participative managers.
Interventions by psychiatrists can help employees--it's not a pipe dream. We know of two psychiatrists who on separate occasions intervened into the authoritarian run Postal Service in San Francisco with positive results for their clients. When work abuse hits the headlines as a matter of public concern, more psychiatrists will begin to confront dysfunctional workplaces.
Changing the Work Culture is More Difficult
The second, more difficult facet of treatment and prevention is changing the work cultures themselves. This task is more difficult because of the resistance of top managers to letting any control go, not because there are no solutions.
Many, if not most, organization consultants unconsciously collude to prevent change toward work structures that will alleviate work abuse. Like most corporate employee assistance program (EAP) specialists, because they are paid by managers who wish to maintain control, organization consultants can not allow themselves to see the employees' need for them to confront the abuse issue. In our experience, EAP specialists are confined to counseling employees who are alcoholic--instead of confronting inappropriate power tactics and resolving conflicts that cause much of the stress at work.
Even though there is foot dragging by many managers and consultants, literature in organization psychology has examples of successful change processes resulting in participative work cultures. In collaborative cultures, employee work satisfaction and productivity skyrocket. Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence, 1982), in his most recent television special on organization change, "New Alliance for Leadership," investigated 4 organizations which had turned participative in order to survive economically.
As Peters put it, "I expected to find 4 leaders, and instead I found 4,000." The U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor-Management Relations and Cooperative Programs, also has produced several half-hour videos on successful participation efforts in 5 workplaces. The Bureau can be contacted for information on a full range of participation programs.
Plenty of technology for organizational change exists and has been shown to succeed for both employee and organizational goals. The prime obstacle in selling it is denial and resistance on the part of stakeholders in the abuse.

kadokin, ASN, RN · May 22, 2005

Speaking as a nurse and a mental health professional, Bravo. Thank you for exposing a monstrous and often unmentionable problem in our society.

Artis · May 22, 2005

What is the function of a supervisor on the ward. I mean how can a professional allow such things to happen?? Do professionals think and act this way?? Why waste time with such negativity, I just dont get it. We all have the human right to be treated with respect and equality.

Nurses are

I agree that male nurses can be just as catty as female. The last place I worked had a group of nurses who were the ultimate of catty ie "mean girls". The problem was that they also jumped at the chance to have preceptor nursing students and would train their students in their art! I think there are many reasons why nurses are catty. I have found however that the cats are usually in packs (prouds?) and this can destroy the moral on a unit. I have to say the area I presently work in is much better.

NurseyBaby'05, BSN, RN · May 22, 2005

In my experience, the biggest bullies are also the biggest boot-lickers--very committed to a hierarchy.

I totally agree. You've hit the nail on the head. A bully has self-confidence issues and is afraid to act on his own. If he/she didn't there would be no need to play games and put others down to make himself look good.

mirry007 · May 22, 2005

it's quite simple, and I'm sorry to say, that I've found it true again and again thru my professional life. Nurses are women and very competitive, they are especially against "new boys / girls on the block" so if your mom had been an older member of the staff she would have got a cup of coffee instead of her co-worker snitching to the supervisor

mydesygn · May 22, 2005

NOT true....... MEN are just as bad. Sometimes, men are worse.

But men don't go to the boss. They know where to draw the line.

jkharley · May 22, 2005

Why are nurses so catty? Because nurses are mostly women and women are just catty.

I agree with you. Further, the nurses who mind their own business and display genuine concern are not noticed. Only the squeaky wheel (so to speak). I have found the women in general like to stir up trouble. I have avoided this situation for most of my working years. Now that I am a newly graduated RN I am not looking forward to the individual conflicts that inevitably arise when women are in a group working atmosphere. There is always at least one who can not, or will not, just do her job and leave the gossip and meanness thing alone. Generally these types like to have some type of turmoil going at all times. I try to ignore them, if possible. I am not, however, past defending myself (verbally) if it becomes necessary.

Artis · May 22, 2005

Changes must occur within the individual to learn the concept of professionalism and or is it just a theory??

But men don't go to the boss. They know where to draw the line.

caroladybelle, BSN, RN · May 22, 2005

But men don't go to the boss. They know where to draw the line.

WRONG!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, so WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!