BUS600 Week 5 Assignment Workplace Bullying

Student Name

BUS600: Management Communications with Technology Tools

May 5, 2019

Every type of industry, organization or school deals with the effects of Bullying.  Leadership and management ultimately hold the responsibility to successfully model and demand a safe, respectful climate for their employees.  Doing so will produce stable, healthy employees and financial numbers. Not taking on the responsibility of providing a safe environment causes employees to be unproductive and ultimately cost them physically, emotionally and financially (Wiedmer, 2013).  Non-productive employees, significant turnover of employees and a toxic environment will cause rippling effects within any organization causing it to be unstable on almost every level.

Terry L Wiedmer is an educator of educators at Ball state.  In her article, Workplace Bullying: Costly and Preventable, she expounds on the ramifications of Bullying and the steps needed to promote a safe environment in the workplace. As she states, the ramifications of bullying in America are staggering financially and morally for companies;  emotionally, physically and economically for employees and morally for the mindset of our country

(Wiedmer, 2013).

I spent three years working in retail, where bullying is pervasive between the customer and the retail employee.  I worked in the pharmacy department as a Pharmacy Technician at

Walgreens.  I quickly learned that if you mix sick people, older adults, medicine, insurance, and Medicare, it’s not a pretty picture.  There was a lot of stress on that job.  Adding the fact that you never knew when a customer would bully you to attempt to get their prescription when they thought they should get it, compounded the stress exponentially.

I concluded that the public is very demanding.  The attitude of entitlement is destroying simple courtesy to one another.  Additionally, the lack of management to address bullying in the retail setting is minimal at best (Judy 2013).  Because of the mindset that “customer knows best,” retail bullying is more accepted.  Thus management will acknowledge the person bullying (the customer) and almost affirm them. Meanwhile, the employee is left feeling they’ve just been bullied again. This method of dealing with customer bullying produces a lack of trust in management, and employee morale is crushed.  There’s high employee turnover, and nothing is ever done to address the issue. 

Cigna avoided a situation where I was bullied, by merely moving the person to another department.  When I was hired at Cigna, forty-two other people were employed at the same time. By the time I left that department, two years later, there were only four people of the original forty-two remaining.  Management’s lack of addressing the concerns of its employees in that department, destroyed morale, produced stress and cause most of the initially hired employees to move to employment in other departments or outside of Cigna.

We have read in our textbook that Southwest Airlines believes happy employees will make satisfied customers (Baak, 2012, Sect. 1.1). Chick-fil-a has also risen to have the most satisfied customers for the three years in a row (Klein 2018).  They too have the philosophy of happy employees will go out of their way to make their customers experience great.  In other words, it seems they believe that killing them with kindness works.  I would tend to agree. 

Wiedmer stated, “Positive and trusting relationships among adults and the knowledge that concern will be taken seriously are critical components to preventing and remedying bullying” (Wiedmer 2013, pg.39-49). Taking every complaint seriously gives respect to the person being bullied.  Management must also take responsibility for the implementation of policies and procedures.  Without the ‘teeth’ of these policies and procedures, workplace bullying will continue infecting every organization.

References

Wiedmer, T.L. (2013) Workplace Bullying: Costly and Preventable. Retrieved from https://ashford.content.edu .

Baack, D. (2012). Management communication [Electronic version]. Retrieved from

https://ashford.content.edu .

Judy, V. R., & McCormack, D. (2013). Employee perceptions of workplace bullying and their implications. International Journal of Workplace Health Management, 6(2), 92-103.

Para. 1 Retrieved from:  https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/IJWHM-05-

2012-0013

Klein, D. (June 2018) QSRMagazine.com . Study: Chick-fil-A Has the Most Satisfied Customers. Retrieved from: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/fast-food/study-chick-fil-has-mostsatisfied-customers

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