Good grief: Victimized employees don’t get a break

As if being picked on wasn’t bad enough, victims of workplace mistreatment may also be seen as bullies themselves, even if they’ve never engaged in such behavior. Adding insult to injury, victims may even be seen by supervisors as worse employees, despite exemplary performance. Bullies, on the other hand, may be given a pass if they are liked by their supervisor.

A study about this bias toward victim blaming was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

What the researchers say: “The results are eye-opening,” said the lead author. “I think they are useful because, given all of these accounts in the media of bad behavior happening, people are often left wondering how we can blame victims, and why do we let these perpetrators off the hook, why do they go unpunished?”

He attributes the flawed decision making to cognitive biases, such as the halo effect, in which positive attributes mask negative traits, or the horns effect, in which one negative attribute casts a person in a completely negative light. He recommends that supervisors receive bias training.

“The first step is really awareness of these biases,” the researchers said. “We hope this study will at least bring awareness to people’s potential for bias.”

They performed their work over the course of four studies. The first two studies showed through surveys of employees and supervisors that supervisors tend to view victims of bullying as being bullies themselves.

Studies three and four were experiments where participants evaluated employees based on descriptions of their work performance, as well as how they treated others and how they were treated.

They found that even when evaluators were clearly informed that a victim did not mistreat others, victims were still seen as bullies. In the fourth study, they found that not only are victims seen as bullies despite evidence to the contrary, but also that they receive lower job performance evaluations as a result of being victimized.

The researchers found support in all four studies that bullies were less likely to be seen as deviant when their supervisor considered them to be good performers.

“What I think is really interesting about this is, when you hear stories of high-profile people engaging in bad behavior at work, a lot of these people have gone unpunished for long periods of time,”says the lead researcher. “And we have examples of victims of this bad behavior being called out and attacked on social media and by the media. Our studies show this is actually pretty common. We’re all susceptible to these biases.”

So what? Two prize examples of what the researchers are talking about—the victim blaming that occurred during Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during and after Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing and earlier Anita Hill’s slamming during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.

Alicia and I see corporate examples of this every day when high-flying employees—especially rainmakers in law firms—are excused their bullying and misbehavior. We’ve seen it in the banking industry when whistleblowers have been pilloried and those that they were complaining about were given rewards.

What is it in human design that makes this happen? I think there’s two elements here. Firstly, we tend to admire “strong” individuals and denigrate those who we perceive to be “weak.” It’s in our DNA to seek the protection of those that we see as strong and we see the victims as our rivals for his or her attention and support.

Secondly, bullies are often seen by management as being more “effective” even when this is self-evidently not true. I have been told by corporate leaders that bullies—even psychopaths—get things done. It’s one of the reasons that sociopaths, narcissists etc. often rise through the brank of organizations. Some 15% of CEOs of major companies are certifiable psychopaths whereas they constitute less than 1% of the population.