The Equal Employment Opportunities Trust defines harassment as “any unwelcome comment, conduct or gesture that is insulting, intimidating, humiliating, malicious, degrading or offensive”. It might be repeated or an isolated incident but it is so significant that it adversely affects someone’s performance, contribution or work environment. It can include physical, degrading or threatening behaviour, abuse of power, isolation, discrimination, sexual and/or racial harassment. Harassment is behaviour that is unwanted by the recipient even if the recipient does not tell the harasser that the behaviour is unwanted.
The Employment Relations Authority has offered the following definition of bullying:
“The concept of bullying has not been defined in a legal sense because it is a difficult concept. Bullying is about behaviours that are repeated and carried out with a desire to exert dominance and an intention to cause fear and distress. The behaviours usually include elements of personal denigration and disdain of the person subject to it. It is intended to control the behaviours or actions of its target in particular ways.
“Bullying usually refers to behaviour of an employer to an employee, between two or more employee’s [sic] and occasionally even by an employee towards a supervisor or manager. Criticism or feedback from an employer is not bullying although it might become so because of the manner or purpose of its delivery or a particular vulnerability of the recipient.”5
Such behaviours include but are not limited to:
- physical violence and intimidation
- vexatious reports and malicious rumours
- verbal threats, yelling, screaming, sarcasm, offensive language or inappropriate comments
- excluding or isolating employees (including assigning meaningless tasks unrelated to the job or giving employees impossible tasks or enforced overwork)
- deliberately changing work rosters to inconvenience particular employees
- undermining work performance by deliberately withholding information vital for effective work performance
- inappropriate or unwelcome sexual attention
- demands for special treatment
- not discussing issues with colleagues in a cordial or respectful manner
- racial or ethnic slurs.
It is necessary to distinguish the difference between the essential interaction of a manager/ employee (or supervisor/trainee) and bullying. In this respect it is important to support and acknowledge a manager or supervisor’s responsibility to deal with any performance problems of an employee or trainee, by providing constructive feedback in a positive and professional manner.6 Personal conflict between colleagues may not necessarily be unprofessional behaviour and must be acknowledged in that context.
References
5 Isaac v Chief Executive of the Ministry of Social Development 05/06/08, V Campbell (member) AA 200/08
6 Code of Practice, Violence, Aggression and Bullying at Work. Commission for Occupational Safety and Health (Western Australia) 2006.