Bosses bullied at work by junior employees

One in eight people who have been the victim of workplace bullying say their tormentor was someone junior to them. The problem of bosses being bullied by their subordinates was revealed in a survey at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society in Manchester.

One in eight people who have been the victim of workplace bullying say their tormentor was someone junior to them. The problem of bosses being bullied by their subordinates was revealed in a survey at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society in Manchester.

Examples included managers not being told of important phone calls, bosses being given a different version of the minutes of meetings from everyone else and answering machines being tampered with.

Psychologists said that employers needed to do more to tackle workplace bullying and the problem of "gang harassments''. In one case a woman line manager was turned on by the entire team beneath her after she was appointed to a post for which an internal, male applicant had been rejected.

A survey of a thousand people carried out by the Chartered Institute of People and Development found that 13 per cent of employees said they had been bullied at work in the last six months.

Of those, 12 per cent admitted that they had been bullied by a subordinate The vast majority did not make a formal complaint about their harassment, despite 80 per cent of the companies involved in the survey saying they had policies on bullying.

Noreen Tehrani, a consultant psychologist who advises firms on bullying, said: "It can be very difficult for people who are being bullied by subordinates to do something about it.

"There is the issue of pride, that they think they should be able to manage it, and the problem that they are often being bullied by a number of people beneath them rather than just one individual.''