Mobbing

Mobbing, as a sociological term, means bullying of an individual by a group, in any context, such as a family, peer group, school, workplace, neighborhood, community, or online. Mobbing, as a sociological term, means bullying of an individual by a group, in any context, such as a family, peer group, school, workplace, neighborhood, community, or online. When it occurs as physical and emotional abuse in the workplace, such as ‘ganging up’ by co-workers, subordinates or superiors, to force someone out of the workplace through rumor, innuendo, intimidation, humiliation, discrediting, and isolation, it is also referred to as malicious, nonsexual, nonracial / racial, general harassment. Victims of workplace mobbing frequently suffer from: adjustment disorders, somatic symptoms, psychological trauma (e.g., trauma tremors or sudden onset selective mutism), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and major depression. In mobbing targets with PTSD, Leymann notes that the 'mental effects were fully comparable with PTSD from war or prison camp experiences.' Some patients may develop alcoholism or other substance abuse disorders. Family relationships routinely suffer. Workplace targets and witnesses may even develop brief psychotic episodes occupational psychosis generally with paranoid symptoms. Leymann estimated that 15% of suicides in Sweden could be directly attributed to workplace mobbing. Konrad Lorenz, in his book entitled On Aggression (1966), first described mobbing among birds and animals, attributing it to instincts rooted in the Darwinian struggle to thrive (see animal mobbing behavior). In his view, most humans are subject to similar innate impulses but capable of bringing them under rational control. Lorenz's explanation for his choice of the English word Mobbing was omitted in the English translation by Marjorie Kerr Wilson. According to Kenneth Westhues, Lorenz chose the word mobbing because he remembered in the collective attack by birds, the old German term hassen auf, which means 'to hate after' or 'to put a hate on' was applied and this emphasised 'the depth of antipathy with which the attack is made' rather than the English word mobbing which emphasised the collective aspect of the attack. In the 1970s, the Swedish physician Peter-Paul Heinemann  applied Lorenz's conceptualization to the collective aggression of children against a targeted child. In the 1980s, professor and practising psychologist Heinz Leymann applied the term to ganging up in the workplace. In 2011, anthropologist Janice Harper published an essay in The Huffington Post suggesting that some of the anti-bully approaches effectively constitute a form of mobbing by using the label 'bully' to dehumanize, encouraging people to shun and avoid people labeled bullies, and in some cases, sabotage their work or refuse to work with them, while almost always calling for their exclusion and termination from employment. Janice Harper followed her Huffington Post essay with a series of essays in both The Huffington Post and in her column, Beyond Bullying: Peacebuilding at Work, School and Home in Psychology Today that argued that mobbing is a form of group aggression innate to primates, and that those who engage in mobbing are not necessarily 'evil' or 'psychopathic,' but responding in a predictable and patterned manner when someone in a position of leadership or influence communicates to the group that someone must go. For that reason, she indicated that anyone can and will engage in mobbing, and that once mobbing gets underway, just as in the animal kingdom it will almost always continue and intensify as long as the target remains with the group. She subsequently published a book on the topic in which she explored animal behavior, organizational cultures and historical forms of group aggression, suggesting that mobbing is a form of group aggression on a continuum of structural violence with genocide as the most extreme form of mob aggression.