Types of Workplace Bullying
1. Verbal Bullying: It is also known as oral bullying. It means spreading negativity for someone through your words. It is done by using harmful, inappropriate language for someone. It means insulting, threatening, or demeaning someone by words. Like making fun of someone’s name, raising a voice aggressively, or making comments on someone’s physical appearance or abilities. They are considered verbal bullying.
2. Physical Bullying: It means making harmful contact with the victim’s body, such as fighting, showing explicit gestures, physical assault, etc. It is one of the most extreme forms of bullying because it can lead to serious harm to the individual. It may be intended to gain control and dominance over a co-worker. It is less common in a professional environment like the workplace. But if it happens, then it is a serious concern and urgent action is needed.
3. Psychological Bullying: It means doing things that could have bad effects on the employee’s mental or emotional well-being. It includes things such as excluding the employee from workplace activities, opportunities, and functions, spreading rumours, taking credit for work, sabotaging professional relationships, setting unrealistic expectations, etc. Here, the main motive is to demotivate, isolate, and manipulate the employee.
4. Cyber Bullying: It is also a form of bullying that takes place digitally. It involves things like sending, posting, or sharing harmful or mean content about someone. It affects the morale and self-esteem of the employee. This is sometimes done to take revenge. It could be difficult to detect and stop. It also includes practices like sharing the discussion online, creating fake profiles, spreading rumours, etc.
5. Discriminatory Bullying: It means bullying based on a person’s caste, gender, race, religion, colour, nation, etc. It involves different treatment of some people due to these characteristics. Discrimination means treating people unequally in many things, such as their exclusion from opportunities, making fun of their characteristics, not talking properly, etc. This is considered discriminatory bullying.