Harassment at work: the case of 'mobbing’

Harassment at work, as documented by Janice Harper, Dr in Cultural Anthropology, is a very specific group phenomenon that she calls ‘mobbing’.

A person becomes a victim who has to be got rid of as he/she arouses jealousy because of their qualities and/or have characteristics that set him/her apart. The process starts with an influential person who builds up a network by manipulating other people in order to eliminate his or her victim.

These include the naïve, the sincere and the honest, but, in the first place, the ambitious, the mediocre and the frustrated. The person responsible for the harassment advances in disguise and uses a variety of strategies: inflating the importance of incidents, putting the victim under repeated scrutiny, sometimes by attributing ‘duplicates’ to him/her in carrying out a task, highlighting his/her uselessness, distilling criticism, casting doubt on his/her reputation, inferiorising him/her and making him/her invisible, even to the point of depriving him/her of his/her first name, giving him/her a nickname, erasing his/her name; sabotaging his/her work is a common manoeuvre.

The target may be summoned to interviews which are humiliating staged events, he/she is ‘thanked’ in public to introduce his/her substitute whom she then discovers; her questions are left unanswered or formulated in a speech with a double meaning. In this way, the colleagues who follow the manipulator become actors who come to consider these actions as ‘acceptable’ because they emanate from a person of authority who refers, in his/her speeches, to unquestionable values. This phenomenon can now be described as systemic.

If you want to find out more on this topic, take a look at the very detailed work of Janice Harper.