Horizontal Bullying: Causes, Effects, and Solutions

Horizontal Bullying
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Description
• Thobaben in his article “Horizontal workplace violence. Home Health
Care Management & Practice,” defines horizontal bullying as any form
of hostile, aggressive or harmful acts by either a nurse or a group of
nurses towards one of their workers or to group of workers
(Thobaben, 2017).
• The behavior can be through actions, words, physical and other
means. Horizontal bullying can include verbal insults to nurses, sexual
abuse to female nurses and physical harassment. Horizontal bullying
has been going on for quite some time and it affects the nurses and
the quality of care provided to the patient.

Causes
• Evidence has it that there are different factors that lead to horizontal bullying
among nurses. One of the factors contributing to horizontal bullying is the fact
that that nurses are meant to believe that they can’t assert themselves. Granstra
explain that the nurses’ education as well as work experience have made nurses
to believe that they are unable to assert themselves (Thobaben, 2017).
• The author explains that nurses have been made to believe that they should not
support their peers and neither should they come unite in a collective voice with
other nurses for a common good. With this form of behaviour, it is impossible for
nurses to fight horizontal bullying. The second reason for horizontal bullying
according to Wolf, Perhats, Delao, & Clark is the fact that nursing profession is
mostly made up of women (Wolf, Perhats, Delao, & Clark, 2017)