Nurse Bullying's Corrosive Effect on Colleagues Confirmed

Common sense says that nurses subjected to bullying on the job will look for work somewhere else. Indeed, in some cases bullying by supervisors or colleagues may be surreptitiously designed to encourage the victim to quit.

That sort of malignant winnowing, it appears, is not without consequences.

A study from Canada shows that bullying has a corrosive effect on the morale and job satisfaction of not only the intended victim, but also on the nurses who witness the maltreatment of a colleague. That dissatisfaction can manifest itself in high turnover or the intent to look for a new job or other negative job behaviors, according to the study Escaping bullying: The simultaneous impact of individual and unit-level on turnover intentions, which appeared in the July issue of Human Relations magazine.

"The results of this study show that people are not only aversively affected by their own experience of being bullied, but that the bullying experiences of others in their work units can have significant effects as well. Our results show that merely working in a work unit with a considerable amount of bullying is linked to higher employee turnover intentions," the study said.

Workplace bullying is particularly germane to healthcare because, as the study notes, it is "a prevalent phenomenon in the healthcare industry and nurses tend to have a greater likelihood of experiencing such harmful behaviors than other healthcare professionals. Furthermore, bullying in the healthcare industry is associated with a host of negative job-related and health-related outcomes."

The study's four authors, faculty members at the University of British Columbia, said their findings suggest that bullying violates the "deontic model of justice" which provokes a negative response regardless of the victim because the behavior violates accepted standards.

"We argue that working in an environment in which others are bullied will create a sense of moral uneasiness that will contribute to their own turnover intentions, regardless of whether one personally experiences bullying," the study said.

Nurses are more likely to empathize with a bullied colleague rather than with the abusive coworker or supervisor.

"Such perspective-taking leads one to experience cognitive or emotional empathy, which includes imagining how another feels or actually sharing in another's feelings," the study said. "These empathetic responses can contribute to the understanding that a significant moral violation has occurred and the recognition that the victim does not deserve his or her mistreatment. As a result of this moral uneasiness, bullying at large within a work unit will increase employee intentions to quit their work group."

The study surveyed 357 nurses at 41 units at a "large health authority in a western Canadian city." The nurses' average age was 43 years, and their average tenure was 16 years. The average unit size was 31 nurses, and nine nurses responded for each unit.

As mentioned earlier, the study most interestingly suggests that the urge to look for work elsewhere might actually be as strong or stronger for the nurses who witness the bullying than for the victims "because the discrepancy between one's relatively positive treatment by others, compared with others' experience of bullying, evokes stronger deontic concerns. Witnessing others being bullied already evokes a sense of moral indignation, but the added discrepancy between one's own good treatment and others' poor treatment, makes it seem even more unfair."

As a result, the study's authors said they could predict turnover intentions in a particular ward either by how much an individual nurse was the target of bullying or by how much a nurse perceived a bullying environment in his or her ward.

"This is potentially interesting because we tend to assume that direct, personal experiences should be more influential upon employees than indirect experiences only witnessed or heard about in a second-hand fashion. Yet our study identifies a case where direct and indirect experiences have a similarly strong relationship to turnover intentions," the study said. "These findings point to the potential importance of a growing area of research in organizational behavior that gives attention to and addresses third party experiences."

If we look at these findings a little more subjectively and from our own personal experiences, the nurses' sense of outrage when a colleague is bullied shouldn't be surprising. It's a natural human response. It doesn't matter if it is fast food restaurants or neonatal ICUs, few people want to work in a hostile environment, even if they are not the target of the hostilities. It is not pleasant to see the people you work with and rely upon humiliated and stripped of their dignity.

It's important to remember, however, that high unemployment and a sputtering economy forces workers in many industries to suffer through these indignities. Well aware of their value and scarcity in the labor market, nurses do not have to tolerate it.