What is mobbing and what is its purpose?
The verb mob in English means “mob harassment”. It was coined by Konrad Lorenz in animal behavior studies when a group of animals harassed another, of the same species or of another species, and it is the term that was adopted in the United States at the end of the 1970s to refer to harassment at work. The purpose of mobbing is an irrational one. The mobbing is the discharge of an aggressive impulse, normally of a person of superior rank on another of inferior rank with the object to destroy it, simply the object to destroy it. The motivations that this person, this superior can have on his employee can also be diverse. It can be a superior, normally, mediocre, of narcissistic structure that fears that the employee can overshadow him, that he can replace him in a given moment. Or it may be a psychopathic profile that enjoys the pain of others and the humiliation of the employee.
As potential victims, can we prevent or avoid it?
The only way to prevent it would be to restructure the work environment in order to prevent it from happening. Unfortunately that is impossible, it is not contemplated in business schools, nor in administrations, nor anywhere. Therefore, what we must always do is to detect it in time to avoid that the damages derived from mobbing are already serious or irreversible. The way to prevent, to reduce this damage, which we would say in medicine a tertiary prevention, would be directed then to the identification of the first symptoms, which can be the adaptive and milder symptoms, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and so on. Because then it leads to more serious symptoms, with irritability, they can develop alcoholism, they can develop isolation, even family isolation, deterioration of social relations and ultimately can cause casualties or even, as happened in the French company France Telecom, the suicide that affected seventy subjects between 2008 and 2010. In this company, for example, an institutional intervention was made, the president was dismissed and this substantially reduced the suicide rate.
What does the therapy consist of? What is the main objective?
The treatment of bullying in patients affected by workplace bullying is essentially aimed at treating the symptoms. Within the symptoms we will have anxious and depressive symptoms, we may also have symptoms of burn out, the patient has exhausted his adaptation mechanisms and at the psychotherapeutic level we will have to focus above all on restoring the patient’s capacity to react. Normally, harassment at work leads patients to a feeling of total helplessness, whatever they do they will always get the same aggression, so they understand that they have no defense capacity. When we have a stress factor, normally, as shown in the graph, we have an initial adaptation through catecholamines, then there is a more prolonged phase through cortisol and then comes the collapse. It is precisely in this collapse that psychotherapeutic action must be taken.
Is it advisable to remove oneself from the bullying environment?
In medicine, the first measure is to limit the patient’s exposure to the agent that is causing the disease. Evidently, therefore, the first therapeutic measure in mobbing is to limit the patient’s exposure to the mobbing, to the work. Therefore, it is in a situation of sick leave that the patient should be treated. Normally it is also advisable to initiate legal proceedings against workplace harassment to the extent that it is already contemplated in the criminal code and to redirect their work orientation in another direction or the harasser is removed from his job.