12 Signs You Are Being Mobbed at Work: A Checklist, Not a Verdict

You are most likely being mobbed when the same kinds of hostile acts come from more than one person, week after week, for months, and when each act on its own is small enough to explain away. Below are twelve concrete signs, grouped in the three clusters researchers use to measure them, followed by a timing test and a plain account of what a cluster of “yes” answers does and does not tell you.

Think of it as a checklist, not a verdict. It can tell you when to take your experience seriously. It cannot tell you what anyone intends, and it cannot diagnose a person.

Why a checklist, and what it cannot do

Researchers measure exposure to workplace bullying and mobbing with questionnaires, and the most widely used is the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised (NAQ-R). Einarsen, Hoel and Notelaers (2009) tested its 22 items on 5,288 UK employees and found three underlying clusters: work-related bullying, personal bullying, and physically intimidating forms of bullying. The signs below are plain-language paraphrases of those items, not the official wording. They are grouped along those three clusters, following the item-by-item assignments reproduced in an open-access 2014 paper on the scale (Ma and colleagues), though validation studies in other countries have sometimes sorted an individual item differently, so treat the grouping as a reading aid rather than a rule. This is not a scored test.

Leymann’s earlier research grouped hostile acts into five kinds: attacks on reputation, on communication, on social contact, on the person’s work, and violence or threats (Leymann, 1990). The two systems overlap heavily, though not perfectly.

What a checklist cannot do is separate deliberate targeting from a chaotic workplace where everyone is treated badly. Only the pattern can do that, and that is what the timing test and the pattern check further down are for.

Work-related signs

These are about what happens to your job itself.

1. Information you need is held back. Deadlines, changes of plan or client details reach everyone else first. Composite scenario: a project lead’s new client requirements reach the rest of the team a day early. You find out in the meeting, where you look unprepared.

2. The work you get is either beneath you or impossible. You are given tasks below your level of competence, or deadlines and workloads no one else carries. Composite: the senior analyst is asked to re-format slides while a colleague of equal rank gets a normal week.

3. Your opinions vanish and your work is watched closely. Your input is ignored in meetings, yet every deliverable is checked twice. Composite: you suggest a fix and the room moves on. The same fix, from someone else, is praised ten minutes later.

4. You are pressured not to claim what you are entitled to. Leave, overtime, expenses, a promised review. Composite: “Nobody else uses all their vacation days, do they?”

Personal signs

These are about you as a person, and they are where mobbing tends to show its group shape.

5. You are ignored or excluded, and approaching people meets a cold reaction. Invitations stop, lunch tables go quiet, and a simple question gets a flat answer. The Field Guide entry on workplace ostracism explains why even small exclusions add up. Composite: a meeting about your project happens without you, and a colleague says, “Oh, I assumed you knew.”

6. Gossip and rumors circulate about you. You hear it secondhand, or notice a new awkwardness with people who used to be easy. Composite: a former friend suddenly asks whether “the thing with the client” is resolved. You do not know what thing.

7. Allegations appear. A complaint is made about you, often vague, sometimes anonymous. Composite: your manager says, “People have said you can be difficult.” No names, no dates.

8. Your responsibilities are removed or swapped for trivial ones. Composite: your main account is reassigned “to lighten your load,” and you are given the archive project.

9. Your small mistakes are counted, and repeated. One late reply becomes a theme. The Field Guide calls the trait label that forms around it character anchoring: once “careless” sticks, every later slip is read through it. Composite: a typo you fixed in an hour is still being mentioned three weeks later.

10. You are ridiculed or teased in ways that are hard to object to. Sarcasm, in-jokes, insulting remarks about your attitudes or private life. Composite: the team laughs at a nickname you did not choose, and the one time you object, you are told you have no sense of humor.

Intimidation signs

These signs are about fear, and they change what “first moves” mean.

11. You are shouted at, or you are the target of sudden anger. Composite: a colleague snaps at you in front of others over something that would not have registered last year.

12. Physical intimidation: finger-pointing, invading your space, blocking your way, or threats. If anyone threatens violence or blocks you physically, that is a safety matter. Tell security, HR or the police, and do not wait until you have a longer log.

The timing test

Content alone is not enough, so ask three timing questions about the signs you ticked.

• How often? The NAQ-R asks about acts over the last six months, rated as never, occasionally, monthly, weekly or daily (as described in a 2014 Rasch analysis of the scale). Weekly or more is a stronger signal than "occasionally."
• For how long? Leymann's research criterion was hostile behavior at least weekly for about six months, but Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf and Cooper (2020) report that this cut-off has been argued to be somewhat arbitrary and that in practice victims feel bullied after a much shorter time.
• From how many people? Mobbing usually involves more than one source. Check whether the same acts come from several people, or whether the same story about you keeps repeating in different mouths.

Two further checks are specific to the group pattern, and they are not NAQ-R items:

• The story converges. People who barely know you repeat almost identical criticisms. This is close to what the Field Guide calls group gaslighting: an implied “everybody thinks so” with no specific claim to answer.
• Management repeats the group’s framing. Leymann observed that management tends to adopt the group’s view and to read the target’s defensive reactions as personality. If your manager quotes “concerns the team has raised,” you may be at the later stages of the coalition pattern.

A late sign worth adding is being hinted at that you should quit (“Maybe this isn’t the right fit for you anymore”). It appears among the NAQ-R items too.

What four or more yeses suggest, and what they do not

There is no official score that turns this checklist into a diagnosis. Researchers who use the NAQ-R still do not agree on one cut-off. One Serbian study proposed different score thresholds for employees in a “preliminary stage” of bullying and for those most likely to be victims (Petrović, Vukelić and Čizmić, 2017), which shows how much the line depends on the method.

So take this as a rule of thumb, not a measurement: if you can honestly tick four or more of the twelve, and they recur weekly for a couple of months or longer, that is enough to treat your situation seriously, start a record, and get a second opinion.

What a cluster of yeses does not mean:

• That anyone intends harm. You are describing acts, not motives.
• That you are certain to be mobbed rather than working in a badly run team where everyone suffers. Check whether colleagues get the same treatment.
• That you did something to deserve it, or that you are being oversensitive. A large meta-analysis of 66 samples found bullying exposure is associated with health problems, post-traumatic stress symptoms and burnout (Nielsen and Einarsen, 2012), so feeling worn down is a common, understandable response.

Three first moves

You do not need to decide anything big. These three moves cost little and keep every option open.

• Start a dated log. Write down the date, place, exact words and who was there, in a personal place off work systems. The Field Guide entry on documenting contemporaneously shows the format.
• Ask one trusted person outside the team what they see. Witnesses often stay silent because they are unsure what they are seeing, as the guide for bystanders explains, so a direct question can help both of you.
• Ask for a specific example the next time someone uses a vague label. "Can you give me one recent example?" is calm, and vague labels rarely survive it.

If you want the bigger picture first, What Is Mobbing at Work? covers the definition and Leymann’s four stages, and Workplace Mobbing Examples walks through seven composite scenarios.

This checklist describes a pattern of behavior. It cannot tell you what is in anyone’s mind, and it does not diagnose anyone. You cannot diagnose a coworker. You can protect yourself, and a pattern you can name is one you can start to answer.

Sources

Label note: This is a plain-language checklist adapted from a published research instrument. It is not a validated screening tool, and no score on it diagnoses mobbing or any person.