Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Jonathan Schultz. Jonathan is Senior Director of Journal Operations for the American Heart Association.
October 10 is World Mental Health Day and the theme this year is ‘it is time to prioritize mental health in the workplace’. October is also National Bullying Awareness Month in the US, which was developed to combat bullying in all its forms. We often think of bullying as a childhood issue, but people can take that behavior to the workplace. The culture and dynamics of a workplace can also foster or exacerbate bullying behavior by ignoring or rewarding it. Regardless of the source, the scourge of workplace bullying, and its harmful effects on mental health, needs to be recognized and addressed.
What is Workplace Bullying?
The most common workplace bully is usually someone of a senior management or leadership position and the behavior can take many forms, including direct and indirect. Direct bullying behavior can mirror the schoolyard bully experience with shouting, cursing, insults, and threats of violence. Bullies may single out an employee to scapegoat or belittle, resorting to name calling or button-pushing in a way intended to make someone uncomfortable. However, there is also indirect bullying that can be harder to recognize as such. This could include setting unrealistic, inconsistent, or unspoken expectations for an employee and then, when these expectations are not met, providing only vague, if any, guidance for improvement or excessively monitoring their work. It may involve knowingly violating work/life boundaries, such as regularly scheduling meetings outside work hours or implying that someone needs to routinely work beyond their paid hours, for example, if they “want to get ahead”. Combined, these behaviors create an environment of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty where an employee can never feel confident in their work and is always beholden to the whims of the bully.
Research has found that bullying can contribute to psychological distress, depression, anxiety, and negatively affect mental health and well-being. The bullied often report being regularly stressed out, constantly thinking about and dreading work, which may lead to physical problems such as high blood pressure, headaches, and gastrointestinal issues.
The career effects of bullying can be similarly devastating, further diminishing mental health. The toxic environment created by a workplace bully is the opposite of career development, leading someone to feel trapped and forced to tread water, removing the confidence in their ability to do anything else. Counter to what bullies claim, bullying reduces productivity and motivation, further limiting career growth. When a bullied employee leaves their position, it can be detrimental to their overall career goals, such as departing an organization they have invested years in, taking a lower paying job, or even leaving with no job to go to.
Bullying and Harassment
When defining workplace bullying it is helpful to recognize that the distinction between bullying and harassment isn’t always clear, but there are differences. Harassment has a specific legal definition and typically involves actions taken against a protected class for example gender or race. Although harassment, like bullying, can result in a toxic work environment, a single incident can qualify as legally actionable harassment. Harassment can be incredibly detrimental to mental health, but because it has a legal definition, organizations typically have processes in place to spot, report, and deal with harassment, although there is a known difficulty acknowledging microaggressions in the workplace.
Bullying is more amorphous and sustained, typically involving a recurring, sometimes subtle, pattern of behavior over time. An insidious aspect of workplace bullying is that it is often excused as workplace culture. You’re not being bullied; you’re being motivated to work hard and achieve. When confronted, a bully might respond that they are just holding their staff to a high standard and “that’s just the way we work here.”
Bullying in Scholarly Publishing
If any of this feels familiar to you, and if your bully is in your workplace, for example, your boss or a co-worker, you’ll be relieved to learn that organizations and human resources departments are increasingly treating workplace bullying as a problem that needs to be resolved. Many organizations have HR resources to help identify bullying and steps that can be taken, often through HR, to deal with the problem.
In scholarly publishing, however, it is important to recognize that a relatively unique power dynamic exists when it comes to the use of “volunteers” in publishing and societies. Frequently, you may be working with someone, or even have a “boss”, who is not officially part of your organization. The relationship between academic editors and editorial staff is a classic example. As editorial office staff, you may be employed by a society or publisher while your Editor-in-Chief (EIC) and other editors work at an academic institution, almost certainly not in the same location and possibly on the other side of the globe. Even if editorial staff officially report to someone within their own organization, in practice, the EIC is often perceived as the “boss” of the journal, which could impact editorial staff: they set priorities and expectations, they determine assignments and deadlines, they work with the staff daily, and their word can help, or hurt, with career advancement and rewards.
The EIC may be considered a pillar in their field, providing important work for your organization as an editor and elsewhere. But being an expert and esteemed researcher doesn’t mean they are exempt from bullying behavior. Over the years, I have witnessed, experienced, or heard of editorial staff being bullied in multiple ways. It can come in many forms, such as repeated and unwarranted criticism, and overly aggressive emails and feedback. Back in the day, it was paper manuscripts thrown just past a managing editor’s head, and now it’s invective and insults thrown via email.
Often the diversity of work agreements in scholarly publishing can make it difficult to recognize bullying. Scholarly publishing can be a 24/7 job, and many editors work outside of traditional business hours. However, it’s one thing to develop an amicable flexible work schedule and another to coerce staff to be available at any moment of any day and treat every task as urgent and critical. Likewise, staff need to be respectful of an editor’s time and a busy editor may send terse messages, but there is a difference between brief and brutal, rushed and ruthless. Overall, bullying in our world frequently involves treating editorial staff like underlings instead of respected colleagues with an expertise in scholarly publishing.
There is also an unavoidable gender dynamic to consider as research routinely finds that women are more frequent targets of workplace bullying than men. Despite efforts to improve the gender balance, editors, and particularly editors-in-chief, remain overwhelmingly men while women are well-represented in editorial offices. In addition, contractors and remote staff can be particularly vulnerable as they are already more likely to feel isolated and unsupported and may be working in other countries with differing workplace cultures.
As with a bully, bullying from an editor can be ruinous to mental health, causing editorial staff to fear coming to work and requiring them to manage excessive self-doubt and stress. The career impact can also be just as damaging, and I know of people who have changed jobs or completely left the industry out of desperation.
Although there are unfortunately people within the workplace, which may include editors and colleagues alike, who enact bullying behavior, a healthy workplace environment will not permit or encourage it and will promote values and enact policies to protect and safeguard staff. The larger problem with bullying in the workplace is the behavior being enabled by organizational environments that allow said behavior to occur and continue. As the authors of the article How Bullying Manifests at Work — and How to Stop It underscore “bullying is a behavior of opportunity enabled by organizational environments that allow it to occur and continue.” The potential problems arise with the workplace dynamic, and it is essential to recognize that this can exacerbate the problems of workplace bullying.
Call to Action
So, what can be done? A good place to start is your organization’s HR department to see if they have a workplace bullying policy. If they don’t, consider asking them to develop one; the Society for Human Resource Management provides a useful template. Some organizations have posted their policies online, which can provide suggestions and examples that may be applicable to your workplace. If your HR department provides guidelines and processes for addressing workplace bullying, you should check to see if they can be applied to outside contractors and volunteers, such as editors. If so, it may be helpful to create additional guidelines for the special circumstances that affect scholarly publishing. If not, the information and tactics provided in the HR resources can be used in responding to bullying through other channels.
Most importantly, if you are in the leadership of an organization that manages editorial staff, do you know what you would do if you found that an editor is bullying staff? Would you stand by the editor or by staff? If the latter, the next question to ask should be, is it easier to replace staff or the editor? You may say you’ll stand by bullied staff, but if there is not a framework in place to confront the problems, or if needed, replacing an editor who is a bully, what is the process for that?
As an organization, it’s important to review your relationship with academic editors and other volunteers. Whether or not they are paid, do you have a contract with editors, and if so, does the contract include provisions addressing workplace behavior? If your organization has guiding principles or values, do they include creating a respectful work environment free from bullying and harassment, and are they regularly communicated to editors and volunteers who are then expected to adhere to them? Is it clear who is responsible for assessing bullying and speaking to the perpetrator, and does that change if it is an EIC or someone else on their editor team? If the answer to any of these questions is no or unclear, you should work to change that before it becomes a problem.
Communicate to your staff what workplace bullying entails, how it differs from reasonable requests and criticism, and how you can support them. In addition to the potential structural changes listed earlier, supporting your staff can involve regularly checking-in with them, and ensuring they feel heard and can report bullying behavior with the knowledge that their concerns will be taken seriously.
If you are someone reading this with a sense of recognition, it is important to realize that you do not deserve to be treated this way. No one deserves to be bullied and there is no justification for this sort of behavior. Editorial staff are essential to the scholarly publishing ecosystem and a core mission of organizations like The Scholarly Kitchen’s publisher the Society for Scholarly Publishing (as well as the Council of Science Editors, the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors, and others) is to recognize and promote the value of their work. Editors and editorial staff are peers, both tasked with advancing the scholarly communication enterprise, and they should be treated as such.
If you are experiencing bullying, additional resources for support can be found online along with helplines for the US and UK.
