Dealing with Workplace Bullying: A Case Study of NSW Ambulance Service

HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT – 712515

Table of Contents
Introduction.......................................................................................................................3
Bullying at workplace.................................................................................................................3
Company background................................................................................................................3
Identifying bullying issues in the organisation....................................................................4
Acting against bullying at workplace..................................................................................6
Why is acting against bullying a necessity?.................................................................................6
Formulating a policy against bullying..........................................................................................7
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................9
Bibliography.....................................................................................................................10

Introduction
Bullying at workplace
Bullying is an act of demonstrating an unwanted or aggressive behaviour towards another
person as a result of real or perceived power imbalance. In an organisational setting, bullying
is defined as an unwanted or aggressive behaviour that an employee demonstrates towards
another employee working in the same workplace. Bullying at workplace is a problem that
has become very common in the past few decades and is creating an alarming situation
because of the emotional and physical harm that it causes to the employees (McCabe,
Sheehan, & Garavan, 2018). Bullying at workplace can be done using a number of tactics,
such as verbal or non-verbal, physical, psychological abuse and humiliation in extreme cases.
Company background
NSW Ambulance service is an organisation that offers emergency services to the victims
stuck in natural or man-made disasters. Like many other of the emergency responding
organisations, NSW too has been facing a number of problems related to workplace bullying,
which has been having a huge impact on the personal lives of the employees working in the
company. Over the past few years, the local media has published regular articles that have
been pointing out the ongoing bullying issues in the company. In one of the extreme cases, an
employee reported that he received negligible counselling from his seniors in his 28-year
service period, in which he worked as a single crew ambulance officer. The situation became
so worse for Mr. Wallace that he attempted suicide later on. Even after that, a manager told
him to “cowboy up” and passed comments like “it’s all in your mind.” Even though Mr.
Wallace filed a complained against the manager, the management took no action and the
manager was promoted instead.
Similarly, when another employee – John McCornack – was dealing with a post-traumatic
stress situation, his seniors kept on calling him and asking him to join back his duty instead of
understanding his situation. His seniors kept on pressurising his doctors to sign off on his
leave, which was an immense torture for him. The situation in the company has worsen to
such an extent that some of the female employees have described the organisation as a
boy’s club that paid no heed to aggressive employee behaviour, humiliating pranks or
misogynistic behaviour. According to human resource managers, such bullying behaviour

show by employees, in an organisation, can be very destructive for the organisational as a
whole as the employees lose their morale and become dissatisfied with their jobs, which
results in high employee turnover rates and a spoiled reputation as an employer.
Even though multiple queries, related to the issue of bullying, have been coming in from the
government, the company has done nothing more than making false promises. Since a new
human resource manager has been hired by the organisation, the human resource director of
the company now wants the human resource manager to conduct a review of the company’s
bullying policies and review the performance of the organisation. Therefore, this report is
aimed at gaining a deeper insight into the issue of bullying prevailing in NSW Ambulance
Services and come up with certain strategies that could help the management in dealing with
these issues.
Identifying bullying issues in the organisation
Workplace bullying is a problem that is hitting the entire globe. According to Dr. Gray
Namie, Director of the Workaplce Bullying Institute, more than 54 million people got bullied
in U.S. workplaces in 2012 (O’Brien, 2012). Such facts create and urgency to understand the
issues in business organisations that promote bullying and should be dealt with by
formulating strict workplace bullying policies. Certain issues that can be identified in the case
of NSW Ambulance service are discussed below:
First of all, one of the biggest issues in the organisation, that has to such extreme bullying
conditions has been the absence of proper human resource management systems. The present
day human resource management systems provide a great deal of importance to the well-
being of their employees and consider it is an important duty to keep a check on them. An
employee who experiences workplace bullying, it is impossible for him or her to not to show
certain signs. Employees being bullied will always show poor performance levels, increased
absenteeism, a greater tendency to quit their companies, lack of job satisfaction, etc. which
can be a sign to the human resource managers if they are capable enough to recognize them.
It becomes an important duty of the human resource managers to keep a check on the
behaviour of employees and identify irregularities (Barrow, 2012). If such irregularities are
identified in case of any employee, human resource managers can conduct counselling
sessions where the employee can be asked to discuss his or her problems related to the
workplace. Furthermore, human resource management departments should consider