Building Psychologically Safe Spaces: Safeguarding your workplace against bullying

By Ngao Motsei

Workplace bullying is an increasingly pervasive issue and is a challenge that should be addressed holistically, comprehensively and with a targeted approach.
Every one of us in the workplace is affected by bullying, and we – company leaders, HR directors, bystanders, targets and bullies themselves – have a role to play in building psychologically safe work spaces.
In Building Psychologically Safe Spaces, Ngao Motsei teaches us how to make sense of workplace bullying. She starts by removing the confusion around what, precisely, constitutes bullying in the workplace – a behaviour that is often difficult to define – before explaining the steps that can be taken to bullyproof your organisation: actions are outlined that are required of leaders, bystanders, targets and bullies. She includes first-hand accounts from both leaders (previously accused of abrasive bullying behaviour) and targets to shed light on how this phenomenon affects all involved.
Ngao's in-depth work on the subject, along with her personal experiences, has shown her that just as a bully can be reformed, so a target can find healing. This book is a guide to help all parties do just that.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Release date: Dec 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781776443291

Book preview

FOREWORD

Bullying in the workplace is far more common than most people believe. It is a phenomenon typically associated with schoolyard bullies. However, in recent years, there has been growing attention to workplace bullying. It is often hard to find statistics on the prevalence of bullying because those who experience it often struggle to name it or to get the support needed from the leaders of their organisations. Yet, workplace bullying occurs in organisations across the globe.¹

Research in South Africa has been scant despite statistics indicating workplace bullying is a problem. A research study published in 2018 found 70% of the 373 participants surveyed indicated they had been subject to bullying at work.² Although South Africa enacted the Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace, legislation alone has not been able to prevent or fully address the complexities of bullying in organisations. It is a form of workplace harassment that often goes unreported because its victims suffer in silence or simply leave their organisations.

Statistics alone cannot reveal the psychological trauma inflicted, as well as the detrimental effects on an individual’s performance and ultimate contributions to organisational goals. Research has shown the effects of bullying on targets include burnout, high anxiety, nervous breakdowns, and even suicidal thoughts or attempted suicides.³ Effectively addressing workplace bullying is an imperative, not only to support its victims but to also ensure organisations have humanistic and supportive cultures. This raises the important challenge of identifying the right leadership and organisational interventions to effectively address and prevent workplace bullying.

This is exactly what Building Psychologically Safe Spaces: Safeguarding Your Workplace Against Bullying achieves. This book offers a holistic, research-based examination of the eco-system of workplace bullying. While the research was conducted in the South African workplace context⁴, the insights offered are useful for any organisation that chooses to seriously address workplace bullying in a sustainable way. This book provides a deep analysis of the complex dynamics among targets, perpetrators, bystanders, leaders, and organisational cultures. Dr Motsei convincingly argues that addressing workplace bullying requires understanding its effects on targets, the motivations and behaviours of those who bully, the bystanders who witness it, inhuman organisational cultures, and leadership.

This book is a compelling read because Dr Motsei shares her personal experiences as a target of bullying. In fact, it is Dr Motsei’s lived experiences that motivated her research on workplace bullying for her PhD thesis. Her story reflects the psychological and physical damages of workplace bullying experienced by many others. She eloquently shares the effects of being bullied on an individual’s self-esteem and the tendency to suppress the realities of being a target of an abusive supervisor or colleague. Dr Motsei’s experience captures the loneliness of being bullied when no one in authority sees it or intervenes. It would be difficult for leaders and managers reading this book not to acknowledge the harmful effects of bullying on employees and to also reflect on their responsibilities to address it.

Dr Motsei anticipates this and provides a comprehensive, systemic approach to address the roots and organisational practices that allow workplace bullying to occur. Combining personal experiences, research, and work coaching leaders accused of bullying, she challenges organisational leaders to embrace a humanistic philosophy in their leadership. Instead of the typical approaches to ending workplace bullying centred on anti-harassment policy enforcement and disciplining perpetrators, she shifts the focus to the critical role of leadership in creating psychologically safe spaces for employees by building humane organisational cultures. Her aim is to assist organisations to build and sustain ‘bully-free’ organisational cultures. Dr Motsei makes a convincing case for this approach because it will ultimately allow every employee including those who bully to be the ‘best version of themselves and understand their values, skills, talents, expertise and passions, and how they can use these to impact others positively.’

This book provides valuable insights not only to leaders and those within the ecosystem of workplace bullying, but for anyone interested in understanding the potential value of humanistic leadership and management. Perhaps you are reading this foreword before deciding whether to buy this book. You may be thinking I have never been a victim of bullying, never bullied a colleague or even witnessed bullying so there is little in it for me. However, Building Psychologically Safe Spaces: Safeguarding Your Workplace Against Bullying offers invaluable lessons for leaders and managers who wish to understand how to create humane work environments. And for those of us in South Africa it is an approach that may move us closer to building the inclusive society envisioned in the miracle of 1994 – a democratic South Africa that belongs to everyone that lives in it.

PROFESSOR STELLA M. NKOMO

University of Pretoria

11 September 2023

PART 1

A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY

CHAPTER 1

Why bullying?

You are too sensitive. It’s a joke. How many times have you heard these phrases said in jest? Perhaps, as a manager, you’ve even used them on someone else yourself at some point in your career.

Yes, words are harmless, especially without context. But these phrases, innocent as they seem, may also form part of an arsenal of tactics used by abrasive leaders to bully others into submission. Bullying does that sometimes; it makes you question yourself and leads you to believe that maybe you are too sensitive.

But first, let’s get back to why bullying. In other words, what led me to write a book about bullying? One of the questions I’m frequently asked is ‘why bullying?’ – that is, why do I do what I do? The answer to this lies in a story that starts around 2010.

I am driving home after a particularly bad day at the office, and I am racking my brain about what’s happening at work; especially what happened that day. I had never before seen anger on the scale that my manager had displayed; an outburst that had left me completely confused because I wasn’t even sure what exactly I had done to trigger such an avalanche of emotion.

I get home. Although I can’t remember what precisely I type into the computer, Google turns up a phrase to describe the phenomenon I’m experiencing. It turns out that this thing has a name: workplace bullying.

Bullying? Really? Does this mean that I am being bullied? Me? It turns out that scholars and practitioners the world over had at the time been studying and researching this workplace phenomenon for over 30 years. The behaviours their research revealed happened to fit my experience perfectly. My first reaction was, ‘No, it can’t be. Surely I’m not being bullied’, because in my head (and, dare I say, in the minds of many people, especially in South Africa at the time), bullying tended to be associated with weakness, with people who can’t speak up or stand up for themselves, or with children terrorising one another in schoolyards. I am many things, but weak is not a word that is usually associated with my character. This revelation triggered my curiosity; I wanted to delve deeper so that I could understand more about this workplace phenomenon which, at the time, was not heard of or spoken about in corporate South Africa.

So, the short answer to the question around my interest in bullying is that I was bullied. Little did I know that the bullying, as painful as it was, would turn out to be a conduit to my purposeful work some ten years later. The experience was the beginning of a journey towards defining my work purpose, namely, rehumanising the workplace, one leader at a time.

Why one leader at a time? Because any change at work must start with leaders. Everything that happens in an organisation happens because of the leader. Bullying thrives if leaders do nothing when it is reported, or it is stopped in its tracks because the leader takes action. An organisation is shaped by the shadow its leader casts – leaders cast long shadows.

I truly believe that if organisations are to succeed in creating bully-free, positive work environments and cultures, leaders, as the employers, must take action, leading the way in creating those desired positive work environments.

This period of my life – and I call it a period, because the bullying was not a single, once-off incident, but rather a series of increasingly unpleasant and harmful interactions – started when I began work at a new organisation.

I had been going through a rough time before I landed the job. I had been an independent management consultant for many years and I hadn’t thought that I would ever make a return to corporate life. That said, I’m a pragmatist, and when it became clear that life as an entrepreneur wasn’t working as I’d hoped, it made sense to get a job to keep the ‘home fires burning’.

I have always taken pride in my work: I like to prepare for each task so that I can perform it to the very best of my ability. That’s one of the reasons I felt enormously surprised when, far from impressing my supervisor, my performance seemed to annoy and upset her. Looking back, I can see that the poor chemistry between us was already in place when I interviewed for the job. I’ll admit it sounds trivial, but the first run-in we had was over clothing. Because I love bright colours, I had worn an orange and lime green outfit to the interview. The colours were certainly eye-catching, but I didn’t expect her to comment on it as she did. My colours soon became the centre of our conversation; in fact, looking back, my then-to-be manager paid more attention to the colours I was wearing that day than to what I said.

I brushed away my misgivings, telling myself that perhaps it was only natural that my vibrant colours had come as something of a shock. I was, after all, interviewing for a key position in a conservative organisation, and I thought it possible that my boss’ comments were something of a test to see whether I could take pressure. However, even then, I knew that it was not what my manager had said that struck a nerve; rather, it was her tone of voice and facial expression as she said it.

Even after I’d started working for the organisation, it took a while for me to realise what was going on, because the manager’s manner of attack was so subtle, most times. She was a master of organisational politics; hardly surprising, since she had been a member of the organisation for more than ten years and had become well-known and well-connected during that time.

Such was the manager’s knack for bullying that I was never quite sure whether the attack was real or imagined. Often, I walked away from an interaction asking myself what exactly had happened. These feelings of discomfort were all the more difficult for me to understand because in public – at meetings or when other people were with us – the manager was the very model of support, the best line manager one could wish for.

After a while, though, I noticed a pattern in the manager’s behaviour that made me realise this went beyond my imagination. What I remember most about this time is not what she did or said, but how she made me feel. Nor did she necessarily have to say anything to make me feel this way: often, all it took was a particular facial expression or body language. For example, I would ask a question, and she would look at me as if I was being ludicrous. Even when she was giving positive feedback, her body language seemed to contradict what she was saying. I felt entirely diminished by her.

While writing this book, I went through all my journal entries from that time. What stands out most is the power play that was expressed in our relationship. My manager occupied a very powerful position, and she took great pains to emphasise the distinction between her position and my own. During our meetings, she would choose to sit behind her large desk rather than taking a seat around the meeting table, as if purposely putting distance between us. The message was clear: ‘I am here; you are there. We are separate.’

Her reaction to me left me feeling deeply puzzled. I pride myself on being a conscientious worker. Other people in my team noticed the quality of my work and, yet, no matter what I delivered my manager seemed always to find fault with me or my work. She seemed to take pleasure at pointing out ‘holes’ in my work, especially when I presented to the management committee.

Eventually, I worked up the courage to ask her what more she wanted from me; why she had a problem with me. I pointed out that I had delivered on all my targets, and had received positive feedback from many other colleagues, including people outside of our team. I was even happy to let her take the credit for what I had done; it mattered more to me that we delivered on our objectives than being recognised as the person who had made it happen.

I didn’t receive a definite answer to my question – but, as time progressed, I came to learn that I was not the only person who had become disheartened because of her. It transpired that no fewer than three highly qualified, highly accomplished, talented people had left the organisation during the past three years – all of whom had reported to this same individual. All of them had been committed to doing good work, but their resolve fell apart in the face of her treatment of them. That was strangely comforting, in a way: it made me realise that none of this was my imagination, and that my manager was the common denominator. Therefore, this had nothing to do with me.

However, I still didn’t understand that I was being bullied. The more I studied bullying, the more I realised that most of the perceptions we hold around this phenomenon are incorrect. For example, we tend to think of bullies or abrasive leaders as people with confidence to spare; they strike us as highly competent, extremely self-aware, and self-assured. This couldn’t be further from the truth. My research has since shown me that bullies have little to no self-awareness; they’re completely ignorant of how their behaviour affects other people or how it shapes their direct environment. They often tend to hold deep-seated doubts about their own abilities. They use their power to hide their limitations, because their greatest fear is being seen as incompetent.

Interestingly, most managers who bully will insist that they’re not bullies.