One of the essential requirement that is needed for my qualification as a professional nurse is to have a set of skills that can be derived from the workplace during undergraduate study. In my final year of college, I wanted to improve on my skills and therefore sought an internship opportunity in a mental health unit near my hometown. I remember being excited about this opportunity and when the time came, I reported for duty with all the expectations of learning and being equipped with the necessary skills that I need for increasing my experience as a healthcare provider. During my first week, everything went smoothly. I never experienced any negativity from the work or the people that I was attached to work with. This continued for about two weeks until I started realizing the change in the behavior of some of my colleagues as well as attitude towards me. Some of them wanted me to do all their paperwork, something that was not personally my duty and others had the audacity to send me coffee around the office which I obliged at first but begun feeling uneasy.
However, these were not the only form of negativity I was experiencing at the mental health facility, but I realized that some of the staff members might have been taking advantage of me and doing this on purpose. As time progressed, I realized that what I was facing was actually workplace bullying and mobbing from staff as there was a wide range of scenarios that could indicate this. For instance, I experienced constant criticism. Whatever I did, was always met with negative criticism from some employers stating that ‘the problem with you young generation think that you know everything.’ I found this statement demeaning as it did not only criticize any endeavors I did, but it made me feel that regardless of what I do, my actions would not be appreciated. Other ways that I felt I was being bullied was the fact that there was a lot of intimidation as well as undermining by the staff that had worked there for a long time. During this time, they never allowed me to do anything practical by myself. They always insisted that I have someone to still be on the lookout for anything so that I do not mess up and this hampered my performance significantly as well as made my work quite difficult.
Many victims of workplace bullying tend to suffer severe psychological as well as social pressure. This type of harassment could be more intense compared to the other kind of bullying such as school bullying because the attitude of the people undertaking the mobbing and bullying are usually doing this based on the established policies of the organization (Harper, 2013). Working for the mental health faculty, I realized this was the case because under many occasions when I was mistreated, there was always a form of justification form the individuals which were owned as either a rule, part of the culture or standard code of conduct to ‘sharpen the new employee.’ According to research, a lot of workplace bullying goes unreported by the victims themselves because they are afraid of the consequences that might result. For that reason, much of this mobbing is often reported only by a senior person of the management who does not tolerate the behavior rather than the victim. I remember that there were many instances that I wanted to report these activities by the staff to the administration of the organization but I never did it for the fear that whoever I might be reporting to, could have been in cahoots with the staff members who could seriously affect my job and so I never reported.
The three models of Emotional Intelligence are essential in understanding what a person is experiencing cyberbullying goes through and the reason they still continue with their work without reporting or why they do in the end as well as establishing some of the remedies for this problem. For the sake of explaining my experiences at the mental health facility, three models would be used. That is the ability model, the mixed model and Trait model. These models also help in understanding the impact of the vice on teamwork, patient safety as well as continual improvement of quality at the workplace
Ability Model
Perceiving emotions entails understanding the nonverbal signs such as body language from other individuals or facial expressions (Martin, 2018). During my working period at the facility, I established that the body language of the workers towards anything a lot of the things that I did was unwelcoming. For instance, at one point, my supervisors asked me to attend to a patient with an assistant nurse. I remember doing everything, but when the supervisor required an update, he faced the assisting nurse entirely ignorant that I might have been the one with the information that he needed. In addition, you could maybe approach someone for assistance or consulting on a particular matter, and they would not pay any attention or whisk you away pretending to be busy even when visibly they are not. This was quite undermining for me. During this time, I was reasoning with emotions. That is using emotions, for the most part, to generate cognitive activity or promote thinking. I believed that they hated me for some reason and that was why most of them were arrogant, rude and not quite the friendly type.
Understanding emotions entail the interpretations of the feelings of other individuals around you as well as having the knowledge to know that people might be angry at the situation and not necessarily at you (Henshaw, 2018). It was not until my third month of working at the mental health facility that I was tasked with the responsibility of taking care of patients without the assistance of other staff. This was a defining moment for me as I believed that I must have improved in my prowess and skills over the months and that was why I was tasked with such responsibilities to handle on my own. However, as you would expect, sometimes, a mistake could happen, and you could end up doing something that does not particularly resonate with another individual. One time, there was a mix up in the records which was not my fault, and I gave medication to a wrong patient. Of course, when I was under heat for this mistake, as much as I suggested that I followed what the record suggested and it was not my mistake, no one wanted to hear any of it. They all put the blame on me. However, through the ability model of the emotional intelligent framework, it is easy to see that sometimes people could be angry at the situation and not at you specifically.
Managing the emotions helps in regulating emotions so as to always respond appropriately at all times. I realized that the bullying that was going on was affecting the manner in which I do my work. For instance, if someone was to come to my station and intimidate me, I would be furious and be in a bad mood the rest of the day. I might not be in a capacity to handle patients well with the emotional burden and psychological trauma that I was going through. However, by understanding how to manage the emotions, I could try and brush away these thoughts and focus on doing what I wanted to accomplish. Workplace bullying could lead to many negative impacts not only on an individual but also to the organization (Great-West Life Center for Mental Health in the Workplace, 2018). For instance, when a healthcare provider experiences bullying, they might be affected and disoriented, and this provides inferior services to patients who could have a seriously devastating outcome for the organization if such information were to leak out. Since I understood this, it was essential that I learn how to manage my emotions
This emotional intelligence framework was developed by Konstantin Vasily Petrides (Weebly, 2018). He defined this trait model as a constellation of emotional as well as self-perceptions that are often located at the lowest levels of an individual’s personality.
For this reason, it suggests that a person must be in a position to understand their own emotions as well as traits of emotional intelligence. While working in groups, it is easy to note the different characteristics of different individuals over time. Some people are more irritable than others. Various factors dictate the how a person is going to act and this is substantially embedded in their characters which dictates how they express their opinion. Having a great team could go a long way toward ensuring success especially in this type of working environment. As a junior health care provider at the mental institution, I had to work with to form group works from time to time to help solve some cases that could not be handled by a single individual.
I realized that the group endeavors were severely affected because some members had opted to feel superior to others. This is the negative impact that bullying tends to create at the workplace. The expected nature of a bully is for them to feel superior compared to the others and not have to do things that can be done by the people they are bullying. For this reason, any time we the junior members were grouped with the senior staff, some of them wanted to leave the group and form their own without involving us as they suggested that working with us slowed them down and that made them less effective. Many times we could agree with them and would request that we are grouped differently, but that did not seem to work. It was necessary for us to be grouped with the senior staff since the tasks were still a bit involves to be handled by the juniors alone and also, we had to learn from the senior staff on how to behave and do work. With the trait model, it could have been possible to understand your own emotions but then realizing that of others would be challenging as everyone had their behaviors when it came to bullying and thus the importance of being able to understand the emotion of other individuals as well.
This model calls for self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation and social skills such as leadership and conflict management (Gutierrez-Cobo, Cabello & Fernandez-Berrocal, 2017). Self-awareness involves confidence as well as the recognition of feelings. This could be personal feelings or that of others. The problem with workplace bullying such as the one I went through is that some institution and work entities have had a long tradition of it, such that when new employees are employed and undergo through the same, they tend to come to grow in the organization with the belief that it is okay to do that and when they become senior staff members, they are bound to do the same to the new recruits. Doing this could have a detrimental effect on the continuous improvement of quality at an organization. For instance, when a new care provider as myself comes into the facility and they are treated in this manner, many do not have the persistence and patience to be there long after the mistreatments have occurred. A high turnover number could mean that over time, there would be a large number of recruits to ensure the uptake of improved quality of service since, for these improvements, a certain level of experience and expertise is required in this field.
In some organization, as much as bullying and mobbing occur, there are some senior workers or the management that practice empathy and always want to protect the juniors. However, the pressure from the workforce could be too much especially when the bullying practice encompasses the use of company rules and undertakings to justify their efforts. The members that did not participate in the bullying often have empathy which involves understanding the feelings of others and being diverse. While working at the mental health unit, I realized that even though some people engaged in bullying, there are those that did not want to support them and often many times, these people would advise us the junior employees to report the issue to them or the management whenever we felt that we were being exploited but none of us ever came forward for a long time. As it has already been pointed out, work place bullying could be quite traumatizing to the people it affects and for that reason, no one could speak out yet it had a significant effect on how we did our work.
This bullying also affected patient safety in a number of ways. For instance, when I gave the wrong medication to a patient due to the confusion in records, it was established that a junior staff was in charge of the scheduling that morning and due to the harassment she had gone through from one of the senior staff at work, she was demotivated and confused so much so that she ended up mixing the records for that morning by mistake as maybe she was disoriented and could not perform her work well. It is therefore evident that a single act of work place bullying could have such a detrimental effect like putting a patient’s life in danger. In addition to this, teamwork could be significantly affected. For instance, you do not expect a team that is composed of people bullying others to work together effectively to achieve a particular objective (Faltas, 2017). This is not possible let alone plausible. It is for this reason that organizations must come up with effective conflict resolutions strategies that would help solve the issue of bullying at the work place.
After working at this unit for a year and a half, the management was concerned about the trend of work place bullying that seemed to increase over the years. It was clear that the practice was causing a wide range of problems such as impairment of teamwork activities, reduced patient safety as well a lack of continuous quality improvement. It is for this reason that the administration had to come up with a number of strategies to help resolve the conflict. However, the method that the organization came up was not sufficient as bullying still continued. What the organization did was to print out memos and warning letters to staff members who became even angrier and bullying increased rather than reducing.
For this reason, I suggest the following strategies to the facility to help them curb with the menace that ails the organization
References
Australian Public Service Commission. (2018). Preventing Bullying at Work. Retrieved September 19, 2018, from https://www.apsc.gov.au: https://www.apsc.gov.au/5-preventing-bullying-work
Faltas, I. (2017, March 4). Three Models of Emotional Intelligence. Public Policy and Administration, 1-3. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314213508_Three_Models_of_Emotional_Intelligence
Great-West Life Center for Mental Health in the Workplace. (2018). Harassment and Bullying Prevention. Retrieved September 19, 2018, from Workplace Strategies for Mental Health: https://www.workplacestrategiesformentalhealth.com/job-specific-strategies/harassment-and-bullying-prevention
Gutiérrez-Cobo, M. J., Cabello, R., & Fernández-Berrocal, P. (2017). The Three Models of Emotional Intelligence and Performance in a Hot and Cool go/no-go Task in Undergraduate Students. NCBI, 1-50. doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00033
Harper, J. (2013, March 28). Surviving Workplace Mobbing: Identify the Stages. Retrieved from Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-bullying/201303/surviving-workplace-mobbing-identify-the-stages
Henshaw, S. (2018). Bullying at Work: Workplace Mobbing is on the Rise. Retrieved September 19, 2018, from PschCentral: https://psychcentral.com/blog/bullying-at-work-workplace-mobbing-is-on-the-rise/
Levin, H. (2018). Workplace Bullying Prevention & Resolution Strategies. Retrieved September 19, 2018, from Money Crashers: https://www.moneycrashers.com/workplace-bullying-prevention-resolution-strategies/
Martin, G. (2018, January 19). How to Recognise this Extreme form of Workplace Bullying. Retrieved from HRM: https://www.hrmonline.com.au/section/featured/recognise-extreme-workplace-bullying/
Weebly. (2018). Emotional Intelligence: The Three Models. Retrieved 2018, from Theimportanceofemotionalintelligence.weebly.com: https://theimportanceofemotionalintelligence.weebly.com/the-3-models.html
Wilkinson, E. (2017, March 30). Tips and Tactics for Resolving Workplace Bullying. Retrieved from medium.com: https://medium.com/adviser/tips-and-tactics-for-resolving-workplace-bullying-992114af617b
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