Preface
Ever since Ruth's experience as a mental health provider in a psychiatry clinic, where she was ravaged by a female supervisor, our lives have been immersed in others' misery. Everyone we have met in the past 14 years since launching the U.S. workplace bullying movement has been touched in some way by bullying. They seem to find us everywhere we go. And although it's certainly been fraught with difficult moments, it's been incredibly uplifting as well.
We've helped the media tell more than 900 heartfelt stories about the plight of individuals bullied at work. We started our work in mid-1997 and hosted a toll-free help line. We heard the stories that flooded our phones in excruciatingly painful detail, one hour at a time. We stopped counting at 6,000 tales. The movement was necessarily framed through the lens of the abused worker. The research done by those of us at the Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) and our academic colleagues has focused on targets' experiences, because they are the ones readily available for study. Bullied individuals, however, cannot change their employer's practices from the bottom up. It takes leaders within organizations to do that.
We both had had stints as corporate directors in human resources departments in the hospitality and health care industries, which helped to complement our clinical and management professorship roles, respectively. For more than 25 years, we have crafted all kinds of consulting solutions for businesses such as The Work ...
