Your Horrible Boss May Be Making You Sick

While bullying bosses may not always be as extreme as the one Jennifer Aniston plays in the movie “Horrible Bosses,” that doesn’t mean their behavior isn’t harmful to employees. (John P. Johnson/©Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection)

“Horrible Bosses 2,” a sequel to the 2011 hit in which three friends conspire to murder their awful bosses, is a comedy. But as anyone who has experienced it can tell you (or maybe you know from experience), working for a bully is no joke — and it can even make you ill.

“We’ve found that people with bullying bosses are likely to suffer anxiety, emotional exhaustion and depression, and symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder,” says Sandy Hershcovis, PhD, a professor and workplace aggression researcher at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.

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The problem is more common than you might think, affecting roughly 15% of workers, according to a 2010 meta-analysis. The prevalence depends on the definition of bullying, of course. If you just ask people how they feel, the numbers soar. Twenty-four percent said they were current targets of bullying in the latest poll commissioned by the online jobs site, CareerBuilder, which surveyed a representative sample of 3,372 full-time, private sector workers across industries and company sizes.  Respondents said that they had been falsely accused of mistakes, belittled in meetings, yelled at in front of co-workers, excluded from projects or meetings, denied credit for their work or picked on because of attributes associated with their race, gender or appearance.

This kind of treatment takes a toll. When Hershcovis reviewed 110 studies conducted over 21 years, she and her colleagues concluded that bullying was harder to cope with than sexual harassment. The bullying victims were more stressed out and likely to quit. And researchers studying 40-to-60-year-old employees of the city of Helsinki, Finland found that people who had been bullied — or just observed bullying — at work were more likely to be using medications like antidepressants. Even being subtly left out of conversations can have debilitating effects, a recent study found.

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Most — though not all — bullying is top-down. In the CareerBuilder survey, 45% of the self-declared targets pointed to their boss, and another 25% to a person higher up in the organization.

Confronting your bully can work sometimes. In CareerBuilder’s survey, almost half of the victims reported that they tried to talk things out, with slightly less than half of that group seeing success. For some, the bully responded by upping the firepower. About a third sought help from a Human Resources department, but the majority said no action was taken. Much research shows that targets are much more likely to leave their jobs or transfer than the bullies.

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