11.2% of workers are at high risk of suffering workplace harassment and 18.8% present a medium risk. Or what is the same, 30% of Spanish workers have many numbers to suffer that hell in their offices. This is the conclusion of a study by the Social Observatory of the La Caixa Foundation based on a nationally representative sample of 5,000 people.
The worker who suffers bullying is almost five times more likely to develop a generalized anxiety disorder. Detecting it or stopping it in time is therefore crucial to ensure the psychological well-being of people in their workplace. Now there are tools to detect it in time. The study has been carried out by the Cármides research group of the universities of Malaga and Seville, and has been led by the researcher José María León-Pérez.
The project is part of the annual Social Research call for Spain and Portugal of the Social Observatory of the La Caixa Foundation. And the sample on which it is based –5,000 people nationwide– makes this study one of the most serious and worked on workplace bullying.
But when can we talk about harassment at work? The researchers consider workplace harassment “a series of negative behaviors, such as suffering isolation at work, teasing and jokes that are not well received, hiding the information necessary to correctly perform the tasks that must be performed or constant and unfounded criticism, among other aspects”.
Harassment is also considered “behaviors directed systematically and repeatedly over time at one or more people, who end up in a position of inferiority and defenselessness”.
These abusive situations need their breeding ground. José María León-Pérez points out that “the main factors are of a group and organizational nature, such as stressful conditions where roles are poorly defined and facilitate feelings of frustration; competitive environments where work teams do not have the capacity to integrate different points of view and manage conflicts, and that favor the law of the strongest or lack of leadership, and abusive supervision”.
The Cármides research group has developed “a robust tool” for the detection of bullying from a statistical point of view. This technique has been applied through the questionnaire on exposure to negative behaviors at work called S-NAQ, which included three risk groups: high (object or target of bullying), medium (at risk) and low (not exposed to bullying behaviors).
Four months after the classification of the 5,000 participants in that questionnaire, the study focused on almost 2,100 workers chosen, due to their vulnerability, for a second phase of the study. The psychological well-being of these people was analyzed using a scale that measures anxiety. The researchers then verified that “the probability of developing a generalized anxiety disorder, the most common psychological disorder in bullying situations, was almost five times higher in people qualified in the high-risk group of suffering workplace bullying,” concludes that study.
And when these data were segmented, among this group of people exposed to a high risk of bullying, it was determined that 19.9% ??showed extensive anxiety symptoms. It is the alert, now possible to detect with these studies, that announces “the presence of a possible generalized anxiety disorder compared to people who face a medium or low risk of bullying.” A great tool, then, for prevention.
