Combating Workplace Bullying through Executive Coaching Based upon Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

• In Event: 'But What Do We Do about It?': Undergirding a Bridge between Constructive Organizing and Workplace Bullying-Aggression Research

Abstract

Leadership plays a fundamental role in the development and maintenance of a bully culture. The organizational leader may play one or several roles in the bully culture of an organization: actor, target, enabler, and/or champion of change. It is to any or all of these roles that executive coaching is applicable, in order to transform the leader into a champion of efforts to create a healthy, bully-free workplace. A program of executive coaching, based upon Cognitive Behavior Therapy and informed by stressor-emotion-control/support and planned behavior theories, seeks to change the executive’s behaviors and underlying cognitions regarding bullying, with the ultimate goal of transforming an organization’s bully culture. Two distinct theories of Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB) are useful in explaining two types of bullying: Stressor-Emotion-Control/Support theory looks at reactive bullying as an emotions-based process in response to events or stressors in the workplace, while the Theory of Planned Behavior explains instrumental bullying, viewed as a deliberate means of achieving specific objectives, such as obtaining compliance from subordinates, self-promotion, or creating a sufficiently hostile work environment that an “undesired” coworker or subordinate “chooses” to leave the organization. Both theories emphasize the inextricable links between emotions, cognitions, personality, and the social/cultural/political organizational environment, notably organizational culture.

Author

• Suzy Fox, Loyola University, Chicago