What Is Mobbing at Work? Definition, Stages, and Bullying

Mobbing at work is when one person is targeted again and again, over months, by a colleague, a group of colleagues, or a manager, until they are isolated, discredited and often pushed out. The word comes from the Swedish researcher Heinz Leymann, who set a high bar for it: hostile behavior that happens often (in his first paper, almost every day) and goes on for at least six months.

That bar is why the word is useful. Mobbing is not a bad week, a blunt boss, or an argument between two people of equal standing. It is a slow process with a recognizable shape, and once you know the shape, it gets easier to tell it apart from ordinary friction. This post covers what the term means, the four stages Leymann described, how it relates to bullying, how common it really is, and what to do first.

Where the word “mobbing” comes from

Leymann worked in Sweden in the 1980s. In a 1990 paper in Violence and Victims, he described employees “ganging up” on a colleague and subjecting them to psychological harassment, with serious psychological and occupational consequences for the target. The word itself has an older history. Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf and Cooper (2020) trace it to the English word “mob,” first used for group aggression among animals, then for children ganging up on a classmate. Leymann borrowed it from schoolyard research to describe adults at work.

His working definition had three parts. The hostile behavior is systematic, meaning it has a direction and a target. It is frequent: “almost every day” in 1990, and “at least once a week” in the way researchers later summarized his criteria. And it lasts, at least six months.

Why six months? According to Einarsen and colleagues, Leymann wanted to argue that mobbing causes serious psychological and physical harm that ordinary work stress, such as time pressure or role conflict, would not, and six months is a period used when assessing psychiatric disorders. They also report that the cut-off has been argued to be somewhat arbitrary, since this kind of mistreatment sits on a continuum, and that in practice victims feel bullied after a much shorter time. So think of six months as a research yardstick. It is not a countdown you have to finish before what is happening counts.

One more feature matters: an imbalance of power. The same authors describe a target who has little chance to hit back, whether because the aggressor is a manager or because a group of colleagues is up against a single person.

The four stages Leymann described

Leymann laid out four phases in that 1990 paper and developed them in a 1996 paper drawing on about 800 case studies (European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology). The Field Guide entry on coalition-building and mobbing walks the same path in six finer steps. Here is the short version, with an everyday example for each (composite scenarios, not real cases).

1. The critical incident. A conflict, most often about work, that never closes properly. Leymann thought this phase is probably short, and in some cases it is not yet clear who will end up as the target. He described the target as the person who loses the upper hand, the one who has run out of “coping resources.” Example: two colleagues disagree about how a project should be scoped. One of them stops talking about it and starts talking about the other.

2. Mobbing and stigmatizing. Acts that are ordinary in everyday life, such as a joke, a correction or a silence, become harmful because they are used consistently, over a long time, to “get at” a person. Leymann grouped them into five kinds: attacks on reputation (rumors, ridicule), on communication (no one speaks to the person), on social contact (isolation, see workplace ostracism), on the quality of the work (no work, or meaningless tasks), and violence or threats. Example: you stop being invited to lunch, then to the planning meeting, and your comments in group chats get no replies.

3. Management steps in. The situation becomes officially a “case.” Leymann observed that management tends to take over the prejudices of the target’s coworkers, and that people around the target often assume the problem lies in the target’s personality, reading their defensive behavior as proof. Example: your manager mentions “concerns the team has raised” about you. The account reached them first, through what the Field Guide calls triangulation, and yours never got a fair hearing.

4. Expulsion. In Leymann’s Scandinavian material, the situations that deepened the stigma were long-term sick leave, being kept on the payroll without real work, transfer to degrading tasks, and psychiatric treatment. Together they push a person out of working life. He expected phases three and four to differ by country, because they depend on labor law and health systems. Example: after months of pressure, you resign, and on paper it looks like your choice. The Field Guide covers this endpoint as constructive dismissal.

Not every case runs through all four stages. Some stall at stage two, some are interrupted by a manager who does the fair thing. The stages are a map of how it tends to go, not a script.

One aggressor or a whole group?

Leymann’s own definition speaks of hostile communication directed by “one or a number of persons” toward one individual. Under his terms, a single aggressor already counts. Later usage narrowed the word, and many people now use mobbing for the group case and bullying for the single-instigator case.

The Workplace Bullying Institute (WBI) draws that same line and then blurs it. In its 2021 U.S. survey, 72% of respondents said they saw a lone person as the principal perpetrator. WBI adds that lone instigators soon acquire support from others, openly or as coworkers quietly align with them, so targets often did not see the others. That is WBI’s reading of its own data, not a measured result, but it matches a pattern the Field Guide describes from both ends: the lone aggressor entry covers the one-person campaign, and the coalition entry covers the crowd.

Scholars disagree about how much the difference matters. Duffy and Sperry, in their 2012 book Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions, argue that mobbing is not the same as bullying and always occurs within an organizational context. Einarsen and colleagues take a more practical view: only minor differences exist between bullying, harassment and mobbing, with “bully” describing the perpetrator and “mobbing” reflecting the experience of a target mistreated by one or more people. The vocabulary side of this, including the legal meaning of “harassment,” gets its own post: Mobbing vs Bullying vs Harassment.

How common is it, honestly?

Numbers in this area are easy to misuse, so here is what they actually measure.

The WBI 2021 survey, an online poll of 1,215 American adults run by Zogby Analytics, asked about repeated mistreatment: abusive conduct that is threatening, intimidating, humiliating, work sabotage or verbal abuse. Thirty percent said they had directly experienced it, and another 19% said they had witnessed it.

Eurofound’s 2021 European Working Conditions Telephone Survey found that 12.5% of EU workers reported some form of adverse social behavior at work. That figure combines three questions: verbal abuse or threats in the last month, unwanted sexual attention in the last month, and bullying, harassment or violence in the past 12 months.

These are different countries, different questions and different time windows, so they should not be lined up as if one is right and the other wrong. Neither counts mobbing as Leymann defined it. What they can tell you is that mistreatment at work is not rare. Mobbing in the strict sense is a narrower slice, and there is no trustworthy single percentage for it.

As for the toll, a meta-analysis of 66 samples (77,721 people) found that exposure to workplace bullying is associated with mental and physical health problems, symptoms of post-traumatic stress, burnout, and a stronger wish to leave the job (Nielsen and Einarsen, 2012).

What mobbing is not

A definition that covers everything helps no one, so it is worth being clear about the edges.

• A conflict between equals. Einarsen and colleagues state that a conflict cannot be called bullying if it is an isolated event, or if two parties of roughly equal strength are simply in conflict.
• One rough stretch. A deadline crunch, a tense quarter or a single rude comment is not a campaign. The Field Guide places workplace incivility, low-intensity rudeness with ambiguous intent, at the mild end of this spectrum. It can spiral, but it is not the same thing.
• Fair performance management. A manager can give you clear, specific feedback you dislike without mobbing you. As a rule of thumb, fair feedback is tied to the work, is applied to others the same way, and leaves room for you to answer. It does not arrive through third parties first.
• A verdict about a person. Mobbing describes a pattern of behavior. It is consistent with a pattern, never a diagnosis of anyone’s character. You cannot diagnose a coworker. You can protect yourself.

What to do first

If several of the stages above sound uncomfortably familiar, there are three low-risk moves you can make this week. None of them requires you to confront anyone.

• Start a dated, factual record today: date, place, exact words, who saw it. The Field Guide entry on documenting contemporaneously shows how, and it works in group cases where no single incident looks serious.
• Write what happened, not what you think it means. "Left off the planning invite on Tuesday" holds up better than "they are freezing me out."
• Ask one trusted person outside the team what they see. A second read helps you check your own perception, and it can break the isolation.
• Read the twelve everyday signs in 12 Signs You Are Being Mobbed at Work and see how many fit.

Later, you may need to look at your workplace’s formal options, a union, a works council or a lawyer. Where the law has caught up with workplace bullying, and where it has not, is tracked on the mission page. That is general information, not legal advice.

This post describes a pattern of behavior over time. It cannot tell you what is in anyone’s mind, and it does not label any person. If the pattern fits and you are wearing down, that is a reason to protect yourself, not a reason to doubt yourself.

Sources

Label note: “Mobbing” is a research term with a defined literature, not a diagnosis. Survey percentages cited here measure bullying or adverse social behavior as each survey defined it, and should not be read as mobbing rates.