The misuse and overuse of the term gaslighting threatens to undermine our attention to the seriousness of, and harm wrought by, the real thing. I’ve become particularly concerned about this because I have long considered true gaslighting to be a form of workplace bullying. However, over the years I’ve heard workers toss around accusations of gaslighting to describe what appears to be a difference of opinion, not psychological manipulation designed to cause someone to doubt their judgment and perceptions of reality. Concern over the misuse of gaslighting has been expressed by no other than Dr ..read more

image courtesy of freepik.com While teaching Employment Law and Employment Discrimination courses at Suffolk University Law School here in Boston, at some point I insert into class discussion my belief that the main ways in which we resolve employment disputes in the U.S. — i.e., complaints lodged with administrative agencies, often followed by hearings and civil litigation — are often deeply stressful, unpleasant, and even traumatizing experiences for litigants. This is notably so for plaintiffs who are seeking relief for alleged wrongs related to employment, especially when claiming wrongf ..read more

For many years, Dr. Teresa Daniel (Sullivan University) has been a resolute voice in the human resources profession, calling upon HR to be more responsive to the harm wrought by workplace bullying. Her co-authored book (with Gary Metcalf), Stop Bullying at Work: Strategies and Tools for HR, Legal, & Risk Management Professionals (2nd ed., 2016), provides a very smart, management-oriented perspective on this topic. Dr. Daniel is now taking on the broader realm of toxic leadership in her new book, Toxic Leaders and Tough Bosses: Organizational Guardrails to Keep High Performers on ..read more

Last October, leaning on Einstein, at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Wash. DC. Last fall, I accepted an invitation to join the Advisory Committee of the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, an ongoing, staffed initiative of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, based in Washington D.C. Two longtime colleagues who are experts on workplace psychology and gender issues, Dr. Lilia Cortina (U. Michigan) and Dr. Vicki Magley (U. Connecticut), kindly nominated me to join them on this committee. H ..read more

A group of leading U.S. occupational safety and health experts has issued an “urgent call” to respond to “work-related psychosocial hazards.” Writing in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine (2024) (link to free pdf here), these 14 authorities — most of whom are associated with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) — open their paper as follows (footnotes omitted): Exposure to work‐related psychosocial hazards is projected to become a major occupational health and safety threat, with significant implications for workers, businesses, and the national eco ..read more

Since 2003, the Workplace Bullying Institute’s periodic national scientific surveys on workplace bullying have been the gold standard for understanding the prevalence and nature of this form of on-the-job worker mistreatment in the U.S. Designed by WBI co-founder Dr. Gary Namie and administered in consultation with Zogby Analytics, these surveys yield invaluable data that have been used and cited by the media, academics, and other researchers. The WBI surveys cost money to administer, and that’s why Dr. Namie has launched a modest GoFundMe campaign to help pay for it. If you are in a position ..read more

One of my favorite parts of filmmaker and comedian Mel Brooks’s breezy, funny memoir, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2021), is a short chapter devoted to what he and his pals called the “Chinese Gourmet Society.” For some nine years starting in the early 1950s (apparently — he gives no dates!), Brooks and a group of invited friends met for dinner every Tuesday night in New York’s Chinatown. While membership varied over the years, the group included: Irving “Speed” Vogel, one of Brooks’s long-time friends and a textile factory manager turned direct metal sculptor; Ngoot Le ..read more

(Flying monkey image courtesy of Clker.com) Workplace bullying and mobbing. Yes, generically speaking, it’s about the experience and conditions of work. But at a human level, it’s often about apprehension, fear, and even terror. And for someone experiencing full-on work abuse or recovering from it, it’s very likely driven by the dynamics of psychological trauma. A new lexicon Andrea Adams, the British journalist who popularized the term workplace bullying during in the late 1980s, knew well about how terrifying, cruel, and malicious this form of abuse could be. In a 1994 speech before a Brit ..read more

I’m not quite sure when I started to use the term midlife in association with, well, my own life, but I think it was during my late 40s. At the time, it did make me feel older to concede that I had entered this stage. Now, however, having entered the heart of my 60s, I’m wondering how much longer I can claim to be in this relatively youthful category. Well, my concerns are now somewhat assuaged by entrepreneur and author Chip Conley, who suggests that midlife is a multi-stage journey that “may last from 35 to 75.” This broader chronological framing of midlife is just one interesting piece of ..read more

Hello dear readers, I’ve collect some of my recent contributions to the dialogue about workplace bullying and related topics. I’m including several that I wrote about in earlier posts in case you missed them. Article excerpted in popular law school casebook I’m happy to share that my first law review article about workplace bullying and U.S. employment law, “The Phenomenon of ‘Workplace Bullying’ and the Need for Status-Blind Hostile Work Environment Protection” (Georgetown Law Journal, 2000), has been excerpted in the new edition of a leading employment law casebook used in law schools, Mark ..read more