Workplace bullying

I was in London yesterday speaking at an annual gathering called the Battle of Ideas at the Royal College of Art.

We didn't get too many at our session debating bullying in the workplace, a great pity as there were some interesting opinions. What makes these sessions much more stimulating than most seminars is the sharp, often challenging contributions from the audience so that you have a real debate, not just a platform presentation.

Another surprise was the way that audience responses led me to think and say things and head down intellectual avenues, even to the point of defending uncomfortable ideas, that I could not have anticipated beforehand.

Free from the kind of restraints I impose on myself when writing for a corporate audience in the FT, I found myself attacking many of the HR ideas that I have taken for granted over the past few years such as performance management, talent management and employee appraisals.

A distaste of what in an FT column I called the "Vote off society," led me to speculate that perhaps we are all capable of bullying behaviour in certain contexts. As an example I quoted the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment, using electric shocks, discussed here.

There are links here with the kind of dominance and mob behaviour explored by William Golding in "The Lord of the Flies." Bullying in the workplace was discussed by Robert Sutton in his book, The No Asshole Rule, mentioned here. But not enough work has been done to highlight the workplace environments that promote an atmosphere of bullying.

Perhaps there will always be "assholes" in the workplace. But when I started work, when trade unions still had some power, you really could say "you don't get me, I'm part of the union" - the lyrics of the old Strawbs song. I'm not sure we can say that anymore.