Is there a bully in your workplace? Chances are, the answer is 'yes'

Genevieve was working on her doctoral thesis with an adviser with a reputation for being heavy-handed. The adviser demanded total control and obedience.

"It was just total fear from the get-go," she told researchers from Iowa State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "But for basically three years I did everything I could to please her. I could not stand up and say, 'No, I don't want to do this,' or 'No, that's not something I'm interested in,' out of fear it wasn't good.

The personal fallout for Genevieve was high.

"It took a huge toll on my mental health, huge toll, so much that I went and got some counseling," she told the researchers. "I think we just delved into my deeper issues people-pleasing nature and how I was just a very good candidate to be bullied by this person. I fell right into her web."

I don't know Genevieve's whole name nor the graduate school where she experienced these incidents. I read them in a scholarly article by Stacy Tye-Williams of ISU and Kathleen Krone of Nebraska.

They were studying workplace bullying.

"Workplace bullying can encompass a broad range of behaviors from 'the silent treatment,' like refusing to say 'hello,' to purposely not telling someone about a meeting to make them look bad, all the way to verbal abuse and sometimes physical altercation," Tye-Williams said.

The concept of workplace bullying was hard for me to process. I typically associate bullying as a problem for children in elementary, middle and high schools.

But if I look back over my career, I can name several people who defined bully to me more than anyone I met in school.

There was a publisher who held staff meetings and went around the room berating each person, shaking his finger and shouting.

There was a boss whose performance reviews were legendarily harsh, taking a paragraph or two to gloss over any accomplishments while devoting entire pages to mistakes made in the year.

In both cases, I quit and found another job because I didn't think I was ever going to please those bosses or I wasn't good enough to work there.

And, if I'm brutally honest with myself, I've probably been a workplace bully myself.

As I've gotten older, I feel more threatened by younger journalists who navigate the digital age with an ease that makes me jealous. I have not always been welcoming or friendly to those young people.

I'm certain that I've engaged in I what would call "banter" or "teasing" but another person might well call "bullying."

Until a few years ago, when people started seriously looking at bullying in schools as more than one of those rites of passage people must endure, I wouldn't have considered bullying to be a workplace issue.

But workplace bullying is astoundingly common.

Nearly a fifth of all American workers reported bullying in the workplace and another 20 percent witnessed it, per a report published this month by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an organization in Bellingham, Wash., that develops training to stop workplace bullying and provides support to victims.

Some 60 million people are affected by workplace bullying — that's Iowa's population 20 times over or roughly the combined population of both California and New York.

And it's expensive. Older estimates suggest workplace bullying costs businesses $180 million a year in lost time, productivity and retraining.

But don't expect much help from management.

"There's a sort of collective attitude that if it was a problem, someone would have done something about it by now," Tye-Williams said.

Bosses, per the bullying survey, tend to be the bullies most often. Some 61 percent of bullies are bosses.

And personnel officers often don't help. More than 70 percent reported employer's reactions to bullying were harmful to the targets.

But most bullying targets never report the problems.

"They're afraid of being branded as crybabies and don't want people to think they can't handle the job," she said.

Instead, they quit — 65 percent of targets lose their original jobs to stop the bullying, according to the institute's survey.

But that strategy is often not economically viable in today's volatile job and a shaky economy with a weakening middle class.

"It's very difficult for someone who is at the mid-point of their career to find a comparable job with the same benefits and pay at a new company," Tye-Williams said.

Tye-Williams suggests building communities with trusted co-workers in the office. Targets who know they are not alone can help people endure difficult circumstances.

 "We had one story of a person who would send flowers to a bullied coworker without a tag just as a way of letting that person know that they cared," she said.

Other strategies include collective resistance.

"Some of the employees we talked to had created a secret code in the form of a weather report," Ty-Williams said. "They would let each other know if the bully was 'partly cloudy' or 'Level 5 tornado.'"

I can already imagine the screed of comments on this website and social media about the topic of workplace bullying. Someone will use the word "snowflakes" to describe victims of bullying.

"Snowflake" is the go-to insult for people who subscribed to the "Life is hard, get a helmet" philosophy of life. Their attitude seems to be anyone who is sensitive, shy, thoughtful or introverted is weak and therefore deserving of mockery and scorn.

I take a different approach.

I started my career in newsrooms where people regularly screamed at one another. It wasn't an election night unless one political reporter and a state editor nearly didn't come to blows over a deadline.

I remember an editor being so angry that a superior had overridden his decision to send a reporter to cover an event that he threw his keys at his desk, missing the desk and sailing across the room hitting a wall.

Some people might be nostalgic for that kind of nonsense. I'm not.

I'm happy to have supportive, thoughtful bosses who've stuck with me through a variety of health challenges, both mental and physical.

More importantly, we are adults. And a part of being adults is recognizing that we need to use our inside voices, speak to people as we would wish to be spoken to and, when we make mistakes, apologizing for them.

I admit I have not always been the best at following this advice, but I try to follow my old friend Don Adams' credo: "We are all created in the image of God and deserving of love, dignity and respect."

Daniel P. Finney, the Register's Metro Voice columnist, is a Drake University alumnus who grew up in Winterset and east Des Moines. Reach him at 515-284-8144 or dafinney@dmreg.com. Twitter: @newsmanone.