“Often my boss comes and defiantly congratulates my colleague on a job well done.” “At the beginning of the year, the entire department arranged a trip without my invitation. I learned about it from the photos they posted on Facebook.” “My superiors have been told things about me that are not true. As a result, I was removed from my position without explanation. Since then, I have been unable to convince myself that I am not an elephant and return to the position I was in. None of my colleagues who told me how good I was at work stood up for me.”

“I wake up every morning with a full stomach. When the phone rings and it’s my manager, I don’t know what I’ll hear.” “For years, he told me almost daily that I didn’t deserve anything, and if it wasn’t for him (my boss), I wouldn’t be in this position. They are doing me a favor by having me.” “He told me that I didn’t have a home education,” one day he took me in his arms and shouted into the phone. I told him that I was driving and that we should wait to stop somewhere to talk, but he was delirious. I remember coming home in tears. At that time, I did not see the light anywhere. I knew that no matter how careful I was, he would still find pressure to dump it on me.”

The above testimonies are correct and if you recognize people or situations in them, then this is not entirely accidental. Most of us can recall times in our working lives when we were the target of behavior that took a toll on our physical and mental health. Although it is rarely acknowledged by organizations or others (“this job requires a “stomach””, “did you misunderstand them?”, “you don’t want to look for work at this time”), the phenomenon has a name and serious consequences for both the victim and the company or public organization.

We are talking about mobbing, moral persecution in the workplace. The term describes repeated aggressive or abusive behavior towards an employee, which is manifested in intimidating actions, words or ways of organizing work and is aimed at creating a hostile, humiliating environment that offends the person, dignity or physical and mental integrity of the employee, with the aim of causing him to isolate or resign. As F., who experienced such extreme situations at a previous job, says, “I thought that he (the head of the department) would not calm down if I did not leave.”

While there is no specific research data, studies show that one in ten Greeks is bullied at work. However, as Alexandros-Stamatios Antoniou, a professor of psychology at EKPA, who has been involved in labor relations and mobbing for 25 years, told K, this phenomenon has increased significantly in recent years. “More and more colleagues through universities or other places are reporting such incidents to me. The increase is too high.” Unemployment and job insecurity, modern working conditions, power games, behind-the-scenes politics and unbridled competition in the workplace have contributed to the spread of mobbing, he said, while the pandemic and incarceration have exacerbated the problem. “For too many workers, the workplace is a nightmare.”

Abusers “usually have some personality disorder. They suffer from inferiority complexes and feelings – many of them are emotionally dry.”

According to Mr. Antóniou, in most incidents, there is a general pattern: the boss, for no reason, creates a negative atmosphere at the expense of the employee, and the latter is perplexed about what he did wrong, what he did wrong, where he is. missing why the situation led to that. “Often the warden takes care to isolate the victim by setting traps with the rest of the team or spreading slanderous and slanderous comments about him. The shock is great for the victim, who finds himself isolated even from colleagues with whom he previously had close interpersonal relationships. However, the people who engage in this type of persecution have perverted and sadistically taken care to control the communication networks so that they can slander freely. On the contrary, the victims are usually reserved, shy, devoted to their work object. They try to show their worth by not dealing with the underground networks and backstory that any workplace can have, and find themselves slipping away due to a fake profile created for them by the abuser. Thus, at some point, they realize that all the prejudices that existed in the workplace were caused by slanderous paints with which a colleague deliberately outlined them.

Why would anyone waste gray matter to make another person’s life hell? “Mobbing is usually an expression of the abuser’s psychopathology,” Mr. Antóniou says. “Usually these people have some kind of personality disorder. They suffer from complexes and feelings of inferiority, they have problems in matters of healthy socialization and emotional approach and empathy with their fellows. Many of them are emotionally dry. In any case, we see the result. Based on this structure, these people behave in such a way as to hide their faults and shortcomings. And we see, unfortunately, that they often take pleasure in the torture and suffering of their partners and seek their psychosomatic exhaustion.

melancholy and depression

The consequences can be dramatic for the victims. In studies, mobbing has been associated with melancholia, anxiety, depression, somatoform disorders, psychosomatic symptoms, and sleep disturbances, as well as panic attacks, heart attacks, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts. “The relationship of moral harassment with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is also important, as relevant studies show high rates of this disorder in victims. However, the negative health effects of this phenomenon on the abused colleague include various other serious symptoms, both mental and physical.” However, these phenomena poison the working climate in general, which affects productivity, loyalty, creativity, etc.

“The organized state needs to urgently face the problem, because the situation has now reached a very high tension. There is no luxury in Greece unless valuable human capital is exploited or marginalized through such medieval practices.”

It is noted that there is still no adequate labor legal framework, which contributes to the spread of these phenomena. “Those who love and strive to create such situations know that this gap exists. Of course, many times they step on it because they come from there, but because of passion they go too far, as a result of which their actions eventually fall under the provisions of the basic legislation and the criminal code, for insulting human dignity, abuse of office. power, violation of official duties, slander, insult, etc.”

“I began to shake and stutter”

No industry seems to be immune to workplace harassment. Even the academic community is shocked by such phenomena, dozens of teachers and researchers feel trapped and helpless. “Academic mobbing”, as it is called, is the “cunning” behavior of some academics to embarrass, humiliate and emotionally “exhaust” a colleague, usually of a lower rank, through unfounded accusations and slander that offend their personality. and systematic emotional abuse.

HP, a teacher at a Greek university, has been the victim of such harassment for many years. “The first thing to remember. I was expelled from the master’s program, although it was my subject, ”he tells K on condition of anonymity. The dropout was organized by a senior colleague who wanted to promote another candidate and had the ability to control and direct others. “When it comes to colleagues who are in development, they are afraid to go against each other. If they don’t agree, they will have problems in their own careers.” When H.P. the reaction sparked more personal empathy on the other side. “He started hitting my colleagues to influence me, trying to hide things like notifications, setting another date so we wouldn’t meet deadlines, etc. He went so far as to take an object that does not belong to him, only to reduce my strength. Unthinkable things.” It is noted that the Greek university does not have a special service where employees can hide in such cases.
During this time, he developed hand tremors and some stuttering. “Since then, they both come back every time I get stressed. These events also affected my personal life as I didn’t have the peace of mind to treat my family and children the way I should.”

The shock was great. “When you enter the academic realm and if as a person you grew up in an environment with some moral codes, you expect to be able to develop in a fruitful, creative, democratic environment, with transparency, meritocracy, consensus and all these things. what we want to teach students as well as us. In other words, what we want to pass on to our children, we ourselves must first cultivate in our interpersonal relationships. Now he has learned to adapt. “But they never cease to amaze me every time, which is a good thing because it means I haven’t rusted. I just learned not to give in to provocations.”