Project Title: Anti bullying software to evaluate the statistical results of bullying at different areas of workplace.
Aim: Aim of the project is to develop an anti bullying database and test it across various scenarios. Statistical data is collected from three different areas like sexual harassments, racial harassment and reduced promotion opportunities at workplace and a comparison mechanism is implemented across the bullying elements.
Deliverables:
Following aspects are derived while performing the research on the application
- A database is created that store different bullying elements in any workplace and to create a record to store the statistical data. Its rich user interface, which was developed with the help of forms, enables the user friendly environment, such that users can easily work on the database.
- A comparison mechanism is developed to compare different bullying elements in a workplace
- A clear report is generated on the analysis of the statistical data and how it is helpful in creating the Anti bullying database.
Research questions:
- How bullying affects the employees at workplace and what are the attributes to be considered while recording the bullying elements at workplace?
- How to make use of statistical data to create and test a typical anti bullying database.
Literature Review:
Bullying is an act of repeated process of hurting the opposite person both physically and mentally. Any individual behaves dominatingly over another person and starts taking control over them by typical activities like misbehaving with them, scolding them with unparliamentarily language and activities (Brodsky, C (1976)). Bullying elements include many issues like Calling the respective persons name in a wrong manner, Verbally abusing a person, Performing written abuse on a person or group, Excluding themselves from social and cultural activities, Attempting or committing a physical abuse and coercion. (Ashforth, Blake, 2004)
There could be many reasons behind Bullies to behave like this and these include Imbalanced mental condition, Intention to get focused in a group, Seeking social attention, Dissatisfaction about the survival, Lack of knowledge on the work doing and Lack of interest on the regular activities.
There are many type of bullying like School bullying, Workplace bullying, Cyber bullying, Hazing, Political bullying and Military bullying (Batsche, G. M., & Knoff, H. M. (1994)) . Workplace bullying can be mainly caused because of the set of rules and regulations of the organisation. Workplace bullying can be in different forms like serious harassments and low level harassments. Following are a few typical examples of low level harassments at workplace
- Cracking jokes at workplace
- Written statements
- Actions that isolate the person and prevent him or her from working effectively
- Pressure across sexual forces
- Manipulative behavior that may include bribery or blackmail.
- Intentionally damning with faint praise
- Unnecessary interruption of co-workers at the time of work
- Belittling someone’s opinion
- Leaving nasty messages (herefordshirepolicy. (2008))
Their were many people who committed suicide because of restless bullying activities and the terminology assigned for this is called “bullycide”. Cyber bullicide refers to the action of committing suicide because of cyber bullying attack.
Putting all these bullying factors together, an anti bullying implementation is required to overcome all these scenarios. To evaluate the anti bullying implementation, any one should consider few aspects like Identifying the person being bullied, Identify the symptoms and signs of bullying, Identifying the factors like staff turnovers and its importance in evaluation of anti bullying, Impact of stress at the work place and how its affecting the attitude of the employee at the workplace . In most of the cases, schools can be an important factor of workplace bullying. The ultimate sufferers of this school bullying are teachers and other adults working in the school premises. In general parents are bullied by teachers and teachers are bullied by parents. Even children at school are seriously bullied like adults.
The major reason behind bullying is to cover the inefficiency of the individual. Bullying is majorly done by people who are in the managerial level of the organization who try to cover their incompetence. Managers who are capable of managing their co-workers grow well. However, the managers who are incapable of managing bully others. The degree to which a person bullies determines his level of insufficiency. Bullying is one of the inefficient ways of working which not only hurts the employers physically but also mentally. Bullies run dysfunctional and inefficient organizations; where efficiency and profit levels are loss. Prosperity is illusory and such organizations are a bad long-term investment.
Effects of workplace bullying:
There could be number of effects of this workplace bullying and few of them are discussed below.
Effects on individuals: Effects on individuals can be further categorized in to two types like psychological, physiological and behavioural and further discussion is made as below
a) Physiological effects: Physiological effects include serious effects like migraine headache, sweating and shivering, disturbed sleep; sever energy loss and loss of appetite. A part from these, the most common physiological effect is sleep disturbance. Their will be differences in the intake of food, either eating more than usual or eating less. Bullying leads to depreciation in both physical and emotional health which ultimately results to a condition of forgetful, clumsy, short tempered, getting over emotional.
b) Psychological effects: Psychological effects include angry, worry, fear, panic attacks, and lack of motivation.
c) Behavioural effects: Behavioural aspects include becoming angry, becoming irritable, usage of tobacco, usage of drugs and alcohol.
Effects on organization: There could be many effects on organization and few of them are listed below
- Reduced efficiency of the organization and its overall performance
- Lotof effect on quality aspects of the organization
- Low moral values across the employees
- High rate of absence from work and work place
- Drop in productivity, output and profits
- Increase in the legal cases across the organization and employees (herefordshirepolicy. (2008))
As per the act of “Ontario occupational Health and Safety (1979)”, Necessary precautions should be taken by the individuals to safeguard their health and their safety at the work place. This act also requires establishment of Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee for large amount of employees.
Bullying was also faced by females in the early stages of their entering into business organizations. It was assumed that as the women entering the working public increased, a feminization of business organizations may also happen. Many leading publications such as Helgesen’s (1990) The Female Advantage, Helgesen’s (1995) The Web of Inclusion, and Rosener’s (1990) “Ways Women Lead” made us presume that a caring, gentle, and encouraging environment promoted by humane, perceptive leaders may develop. The outputs expected are multiculturalism and diversity (herefordshirepolicy. (2008)).
An internet survey in 2000 revealed that 77.8% of South African people undergone some form of ill-treatment in their career process. On the other hand, bullying is a prolonged process which happens over a period of time on a victim and it is very embarrassing, harmful, vindictive that can open or hide conflict. Recent researches disclose that work place bullying is about 20% in the health zone (Brodsky, C. (1976))
As per the predictions of International Labor Organization in Geneva, there was a rapid increase in the knowledge of workplace bullying in many industrialized countries and thus can be concluded that the position has improved. On a world-wide research it was concluded that 1.5 – 3.5% of a country’s GDP is lost due to stress caused by bullying at workplace. This loss cannot be met by a developing countries economy and thus strategies and policies are put forth to reduce bullying.
Policy how to deal with bullying:
Bullying takes place at many parts of work environment in different stages of one’s life. Anti-bullying guidelines and strategies are trying to develop Safe schools policy to eradicate bullying at institutional level. This may also include:
- Sanctions for bullies
- No blame approach
- Peer support system
- Restorative justice
As per a survey conducted in 2006 with 1,500 children aged 8 to 13, it was discovered that most of them receive abusive text messages on their mobile phones, which include nasty, rude messages from friends whom the children with to sexually explicit texts, physical threats and bullying (herefordshirepolicy. (2008))
As per the information from “Information and guidance for employers’ human resources and personnel officers” there is a policy for all sensible employers to overcome harassment and inequity. This policy is to safeguard both employee and the employer. This policy provides an environment, such that one can fulfil his duties and tasks without any stress from others in any form of harassment.
How to overcome cyber bullying:
As any other bullying, Cyber bullying is all the phenomenon of criticizing the individual and tries to acquire power and control on the effected person. In order to overcome cyber bullying, the effected person should avoid responding to the emails and text messages posted by the bully. Thus, you can avoid them. If you give a chance to bully by responding to his messages, then u may go into trouble as they turn your minds and harass mentally.
The nature of bullies is that they have low self-esteem, they are quite weak and they plan to acquire control over victim’s lives. So once if you respond to a bully, they will try to change your emotional state and they feel happiness out of it, which is their devilkin strategy.
Research Methods:
Both qualitative and quantitative methods can be implemented to develop the database. All the issues and affects of bullying can be scientifically investigated with the quantitative methods.
Qualitative research method is the research done by investigating the people who undergo bullying and also investigating the people who bully. This research can be done by interacting with the people or by conducting surveys. Behavioral aspects of the affected persons are studied by conducting surveys which includes a series of questions like
- What motivates a bully
- How the targets are choose by these bullies
- How to recognize a bully
- How to identify bullying incidents
- How to ignore bullies (Anti Bullying Network)
Thus, the anti bullying database constructed with the statistical information brought from the survey is helpful to analyze the qualitative methodologies. Ethical approvals are required to gather the information from the workplace groups and a statistical analysis done as per the gathered data.
Quantitative research methods are done by creating a database with the surveyed information from different forms of workplace harassments and by proper analysis we reach to the conclusion. Through these quantitative methods answers for certain questions are known.
- Reason behind bullying
- Attitude of the person who bully
- Feeling of the individual who undergo bully
- Embarrassment tricks played in the workplace
- Group bullying techniques
Evaluation:
Evaluation can be done based on the statistical data derived from the bullying aspects from three different places of workplace like sexual harassments, racial harassment and reduced promotion opportunities. Evaluation process considers different disciplinary actions taken against the employees and level of harassment and its impact on the ongoing work.
The information collected from these sources will help build the database for anti bullying purposes. The Evaluation of database is also done by critically evaluating the information collected using qualitative research techniques with the information already published or researched by noted authors and academicians.
Hardware/software needed
Hardware Requirement
Operating System : Windows XP Or Above
Processor : Intel Pentium Processor or above.
RAM : 512 MB RAM Minimum.
Hard drive : 20 GB Minimum.
Software Requirement
Front End : Lotus Notes Designer
Back End : Oracle Database