Workplace Harassment - A Major Concern

Running head: COMMON GOOD
COMMON GOOD
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COMMON GOOD
Many professionals all over the world experience workplace harassment and bullying in
more or less every industry. These might range from multinational companies too even smaller
firms and startups. Healthcare industry had fallen prey to this issue as well. Studies have
described harassment and bullying as the repeated unreasonable behavior that specially targets a
person or group of people (Crampton et al., 2015). These situations contribute to poor quality life
of the targets over time where they become increasingly unwell. However, researchers are of the
opinion that such harassments not necessarily need to be sexual in nature and might involve
affecting physical, mental, emotional as well as verbal abuse. These had emerged as an issue of
common good on a global scale (Budden et al., 2017). This assignment would be discussing the
ways about it affects individuals as well as the ways by which it can be handled effectively.
The concept of common good can be described as the condition where each of the
members of the community as well as the whole community receives the opportunities – “to
reach their fulfillment successfully through allocation of proper resources required for healthy
living and gaining opportunities to achieve their full potential” (Djurkovic, 2018). However, the
issue of bullying and harassment in healthcare organizations faced by professionals is not only a
national issue but had become a global one affecting all nations. The health and well-being of the
professionals facing harassment and bullying gets affected and they fail to achieve their potential
in life thereby succumbing to low quality life full of disappointment and failures.
The Fair Work Act 2009 had specified that bullying occur when two important criterions
is met. The first one is the person or the group is seen to repeatedly behave unreasonably towards
a particular worker or a group of workers at work. The second criterion is that the behavior is
creating a risk towards healthy as well as safety concerns for the persons bullied. In addition, this
behavior should be occurring repeatedly kike more than once and should be creating a risk

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COMMON GOOD
towards health and safety in order to be considered as being bullied. These two criterions, when
met, can consider an individual to have been harassed and bullied at workplace. Statistical
evidence had shown that in Australia, about 3.5% to that of 21.5% of the population had been
seen to be experiencing bullying as well as harassment at work (Hartin et al., 2018). The
Australian workforce Barometer called the AWB had reported that 6.8 percent of the population
had reported to have been bullied at work in the six months prior to the survey with 3.5% facing
bullying and harassment for longer than 6 months. Governmental data shows that about 49% of
the fellows, trainees and international graduates have reported being bullied or sexually harassed
at medical centers. 71% of the hospitals reported discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying
for the last five years in their hospitals with the problem exiting across all surgical specialties.
This is a global issue and this can be reported from statistical data collected globally. On
average, 4.15 of the respondents in EU-27 had reported exposure to bullying at work with 9.5%
in France. Studies have also found data like “in Belgium (8.6%), in the Netherlands (7.7%),
Luxemburg (7.2%), Austria (7.2%), Finland (6.2%), Latvia (5.5%), and Ireland 5.5% and most
uncommon in Bulgaria (0.6%), Poland (0.7%), Italy (0.9%), Slovakia (1.2%), and Turkey
(1.3%)”. Therefore, it had become a global issue affecting the common good of the people
involved directly and indirectly with the incidents (Wright & Khatri, 2015).
Huge number of negative impacts remains associated with the aspect of bullying and
harassment. This has negative influence not only on the lives of the healthcare professionals who
face bullying but also on the patients who they require to treat. Firstly, some of the negative
impacts that bullied individuals suffer from are stress, anxiety, panic attacks, poor sleep, and
depression, fear of dismissal or loss of job promotion opportunities. They are also seen to suffer
from loss of confidence and self-esteem. Many studies report that individuals also suffer from