The first clue that these disturbances are not interpersonal disputes is that they make no sense on their own. On the contrary, they confound. But they do make sense when the scope of inquiry is enlarged to include the political dynamic within which the Bully is functioning. When it’s examined as a whole, a quite different, non personal, bullying-reality emerges. To aid the analysis, it helps to factor out Target employees altogether. The bullying is not in the least about them, except as victims. |
They’re not really involved as precipitating elements. (More on this later.) From an institutional perspective, Bullies choose their Targets essentially at random. If it hadn’t been today’s Target, it would have been someone else. The same was true of the Target before and will be true for the one to come after. Targets are so irrelevant to the syndrome that when they remove themselves from the workplace by quitting, taking their supposed psychological difficulties with them, the bullying continues. |
