Foreword
Gary and Ruth Namie are heroes. No one has worked harder, longer, and more successfully to stem the tide of workplace bullying in the United States and beyond. They started with a more general approach with The Work Doctor®, but narrowed their focus some 15 years ago to become the world's leading crusaders against the “jerks, weasels, and snakes” who infect our organizations—and for too many of us—the teams and workgroups that we find ourselves in at this very moment. This book, The Bully-Free Workplace, brings together their wisdom, passion, dedication to hard facts, and relentless attention to practical solutions.
Many crusaders become so wrapped up in their goals that they lose the ability to make fact-based decisions and to give valid advice. The Bully-Free Workplace does a splendid job of avoiding this problem, bringing the most rigorous evidence available to the table. One of the most difficult problems associated with studying workplace abuse and related topics is that there are so little valid data about prevalence and patterns. We all should be skeptical of web-based surveys that are answered by biased samples, which often reflect a dedication to some political motive rather than to discovering the truth. By far, the most useful and rigorous surveys on bullying have been conducted by the Namies' Workplace Bullying Institute in conjunction with Zogby, a respected survey research firm. The results of this research are important in many ways, showing, for example, ...
