Her thesis creates a workplace strategy – and while it doesn’t specifically focus on professional services, there are a number of principles relevant to the legal profession.

“The model in my thesis is focused on workplace bullying, and this model is a risk-management-based organisational strategy, and it’s an organisational design strategy. And what it does is it looks at the precursor factors of workplace bullying in workplaces as safety hazards, and it addresses them as such to try to prevent the bullying from ever occurring, or to try to prevent the recurrence of bullying and to prevent the harm of course, associated with workplace bullying, the model has five key steps within it,” she said.

“At a high level, the first thing that the model talks about is getting organisational commitment to the model. You want everybody to be on board, and that’s as much the case for leaders as it is for middle managers as it is for workers. You want people to be committed and on board with the model because the literature shows that means it’s more likely that they’ll engage with it. And then the next step is to go through and identify the precursor factors for workplace bullying in that particular workplace and what you get to. And we have all sorts of guides that are available in Australia to do this.”

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These “precursor factors” include three things for bullying in a workplace to occur: a perpetrator of workplace bullying, a victim, and a workplace that hasn’t intervened to stop bullying from occurring or reoccurring.

“The precursor factors that my thesis talks about are the factors that make it more likely that any of those three things will happen, that a perpetrator will engage in bullying, that a victim will stay present, or that a workplace will stop, will fail to intervene, fail to stop bullying from occurring. And so, the precursor factors that exist in relation to perpetrators can include things like my thesis talks about what’s referred to in the literature as the dark triad of personalities,” Dr Stojanova said.

“The dark triad of personalities is talking about people who may be experiencing subclinical psychopathy, Machiavellianism and subclinical narcissism. If you have a workplace culture where victims or bystanders believe there’s a really high risk to them, that there might be adverse action taken against them, then that’s a factor that makes it more likely that bullying will happen or that it will continue to happen. If you have low levels of psychological or collective support for workers in a workplace that encourages bullying, if you’ve got leadership that’s too weak to intervene or encourages that kind of bullying behaviour, that’s a precursor factor.

“If you have psychological demands throughout the roles that workers play in a workplace, like if you have a really poor psychosocial environment, if you’ve got employees that are experiencing excessive workload demands, or they have a lot of role conflict, or they have a lot of role ambiguity, these are some of the precursor factors that exist at a workplace level that make it more likely that bullying will occur.”

Once identifying which precursor factors are an issue, the model focuses on engaging in primary intervention and addressing those factors as directly as possible before monitoring and reviewing an organisations’ strategies, according to Dr Stojanova.

“There’s nothing to stop businesses from implementing the model right now. And there are businesses in Australia that are already implementing the model or versions of the model because they can and because they’ve got the knowledge within the organisation that’s led them to the point that they understand that this would be a useful way of preventing and managing psychosocial hazards like bullying and other psychosocial hazards, as well like sexual harassment and other kinds of victimisation, those kinds of psychosocial issues in the workplace,” she said.

“And part of what the thesis is saying is, well, this exists. It exists today. It’s existed for a long time. We have safety regulators throughout Australia that have been advocating and that have had guidance material out referring to strategies like the model for a really long time. So, if the model or versions of the model have been around for a long time, and then the real question that the thesis gets to is, well, why aren’t more workplaces implementing it?”

If legislators and regulators do eventually have to step in, Dr Stojanova said that in the future, companies could be required to demonstrate that they are implementing the model in their workplace in order to achieve government contracts.

“We’ve gotten to the point where there’s a really clear distilled version of what the model looks like in Victoria. In Victoria, we have the proposed occupational health and safety amendment, psychological health regulations, which are not law yet. The Victorian government is still considering those regulations. But those regulations are one example of a strategy that incorporates many of the advantages of the model and, in fact, often exceeds the advantages suggested by the model,” she said.

“But the implementation of that kind of law, those kinds of safety regulations, would be a really clear, really effective way of requiring businesses in Australia, businesses in Victoria, to implement a workplace strategy like the model and to have the enforcement mechanism of a safety regulator like Worksafe Victoria, to back that up. And, in fact, we have similar related regulations that have become law in Queensland and New South Wales.”

Ultimately, however, Dr Stojanova said she was optimistic that more workplaces would adopt a model similar to her thesis, or a strategy to combat workplace bullying moving forward.

“When you look at things that when you take a step back and you look at the improvements that are happening in workplaces across Victoria and across Australia, there are reasons for hope and for positivity. It’s very difficult when there is a worker who’s really struggling, really experiencing workplace bullying, often feeling very isolated. But overall we’re having these improvements. And I think that’s something that we need to keep in mind, that we might continue to develop and continue to grow,” she said.

“And I think that there is this educational piece about employers normalising this focus on psychological health in the way that employers have come to expect a focus on physical health and physical safety in the workplace. So, I think with that educational piece, employers will become more and more engaged in this space. But I think that we shouldn’t forget the effect of that, that the really significant impact of workplace bullying on workers that are experiencing it at an individual level for as long as anyone is experiencing bullying.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Dr Nadia Stojanova, click below: