Let’s Broaden the Scope: Workplace Bullying
Factors fueling workplace bullying in Korea:
One of the factors that has contributed to the prevalence of bullying in Korean offices is the Stratified structure of the Korean workplace. Korea is a highly honorific culture; people give respect based on age and status and the language differs depending on who you’re talking to. This leads to bullying in the form of disrespect or harassment of younger workers.
Moreover, efficiency of mass production is the top goal and results in rivalry between workers. Koreans are highly competitive: this may seem at odds with the collectivistic nature of Korean culture, but competition can be understood as a strong desire for every person to please friends and family with their success. This also leads to a desire to be better than others at all costs in order to keep a job.Desire to get a promotion, earn more money, and/or move up in the workplace may incentivize workers to not report the bullying. The competitiveness among colleagues can lead to workplace bullying.
Common forms of workplace bullying include:
There are many forms of bullying in the South Korean workplace. Some of them include:
- Being forced to do an unfairly large amount of work
- Being forced to do unnecessarily difficult work
- Being forced to do overly simple/menial work (insulting their intelligence)
- Supervisor constantly watching over them
- Harassment in the form of verbal taunts, insults, gossip, etc. Look at the Tablo Case for a real life example.
Miscellaneous Facts:
In addition to new and young workers, women are also commonly harassed in the workplace, with men as the bullies. For women, pregnancies and maternity leaves often lead to bullying, as employers want to avoid these at certain times so as not to negatively effect productivity. Legislation against this issue is in development, but slowly progressing.
Cases
Gender- and status-related bullying occur frequently. Here are some examples:
- “Nut rage”: a supervisor became displeased with a flight attendant’s service, ordered the plane to turn around and go back to its gate
- Renault Samsung Motors: boss sexually harassed an employee; she reported the case and he became angry, bullying her and her friends further when she returned to work
- Female bank teller went on maternity leave for a year and returned to the job of an usher, because her boss felt she needed to “start over” after taking such a long time off