The Bully-Free Workplace: Stop Jerks, Weasels, and Snakes From Killing Your Organization

International Origins

Sweden-based German medical scientist Heinz Leymann founded the international bullying movement, for which he adopted mobbing as the name.³ He borrowed it from the term for many small birds working together to bring down a larger one. For Leymann, it meant a prolonged attack by a group of workers on a single colleague. In Violen, Sweden, he established a government-funded clinic to diagnose and treat workers who suffered “psychological terrorization.”⁴ Early 1990s research reports from that clinic were the first to link extremely threatening work conditions to posttraumatic stress in workers.

As a result of Leymann's pioneering research and advocacy for workers traumatized by horrific conditions, Sweden enacted the world's first national workplace safety and health ordinance that addressed bullying. The regulations, effective beginning in 1994, called the phenomenon “victimisation at work.” In typical Scandinavian fashion, the law focused on protection of workers on the receiving end of “recurrent reprehensible or distinctly negative actions, which are directed against individual employees in an offensive manner. . . .”

Then, in 1992, British BBC radio reporter Andrea Adams, incensed by the abusive treatment of bank workers, became the national spokeswoman for the cause she named “workplace bullying” in her book Bullying at Work.⁵ She elevated the playground term reserved for children and applied it to adults in their workplaces. After that, bullying of children ...