Why Do Coworkers Gang Up on One Person? Psychology of Mobbing

Coworkers gang up on one person for reasons that are usually as much about the situation as about the target. Research points to a mix: a conflict that was never closed, an organization that allows or even rewards hostility, an instigator with something to gain, colleagues who join out of fear, unmet needs or personal gain, and bystanders who stay silent because everyone else does.

No single cause explains it, and that is good news in one way. Understanding the mix can take some of the self-blame out of it, and show you which parts you can act on. This post sets out the psychology in plain terms, using the research on mobbing and on group behavior, and says clearly where the evidence stops.

It starts with a conflict nobody closed

In his 1990 paper, Leymann described the first phase of mobbing as an original critical incident: a conflict, most often about work. He wrote that in some cases it is not clear at the start who will become the victim. The person who becomes the target is the one who ends up losing the upper hand, and Leymann defined the victim as the person in the conflict who has lost their “coping resources.”

Two things follow from that. First, targets are not necessarily chosen for a flaw. They are the person in a stalled conflict who has the fewest resources to hold their ground. Second, Leymann noted that the harassment can go on for years even though a supervisor or other manager should have been able to stop it very early. The conflict itself is ordinary. Leymann’s point is that it can drag on when nobody with authority closes it.

Motives can also sit underneath the trigger. In the case Leymann opens with, he says the real reason was envy over the target’s wages. The Field Guide entry on envy at work describes how that feeling often disguises itself as “concerns” or coolness rather than open resentment.

Organizations set the stage

If conflict alone caused mobbing, it would happen everywhere. Salin (2003) reviewed the literature on why workplace bullying occurs and sorted the explanations into three groups:

• Enabling structures, the conditions that make it possible: perceived power imbalances, low perceived costs of behaving badly, and dissatisfaction and frustration.
• Motivating structures, the incentives: internal competition, reward systems and expected benefits.
• Precipitating processes, the triggers: downsizing and restructuring, organizational change, and changes in the make-up of the work group.

Salin concluded that bullying is often an interaction between structures and processes from all three groups. Zapf (1999) reached a similar view from a different angle, arguing that the organization, the work group, a certain perpetrator and the victim all have to be considered as possible causes, and that many cases have several causes at once.

Here is what that looks like (composite scenario). A company announces that two teams will merge and one management role will go. Both managers now have a motive to look better than the other. Staff on both teams feel anxious and frustrated. And nobody above them is watching closely. In that setting, a small disagreement with a colleague on the other team can turn into a story that spreads. Nobody planned it, but the conditions were ready.

“Low perceived costs” is worth pausing on. It means people behave badly when they expect nothing to happen. In a climate where speaking up gets punished, the Field Guide’s culture of fear entry explains that silence becomes a shared norm, and a mobbing campaign meets no resistance. Duffy and Sperry (2012) make a related point in their book, arguing that mobbing has to be understood within its organizational and contextual frameworks and not just as a conflict between individuals.

A quick way to test this against your own workplace is to ask three questions.

• Has anything recently changed, such as a restructuring, a merger, layoffs or a new manager?
• Does anyone with authority visibly check how people treat each other, and do they act when they see it?
• Does someone gain when a rival looks bad, through a promotion, a budget or a favored position?

Three “yes, no, yes” answers do not prove anything about a particular person, but they describe the kind of environment in which Salin’s three groups line up.

What the instigator gets

Somebody has to start it, and the motivating structures above suggest why. A rival can be pushed aside. A promotion can look more secure. A manager’s own failures can be pinned on someone else. A shared enemy can also give a shaky group a sense of unity, which is what the Field Guide’s scapegoating entry describes: a team settling on one fixed “problem” to restore a feeling of stability, while the real causes go untouched.

It is worth saying what this does not mean. It does not mean that every instigator is scheming or has a disorder, and this post does not diagnose anyone. Some people act from insecurity, some from habit, some from a sincere but distorted belief that the target is a problem. Motive matters less than pattern. A single sustained aggressor without any group can do similar damage, as the lone aggressor entry explains.

Why colleagues join

The joiners are the hardest part to understand, because many of them are not hostile people. Padilla, Hogan and Kaiser (2007) developed the “toxic triangle” to explain destructive leadership: a destructive leader, susceptible followers and a conducive environment, all present together. Their model splits followers into two kinds. Conformers go along out of fear or unmet basic needs, and colluders join for personal gain. Their work is about leaders and followers, not about peers ganging up, so it applies here by analogy, but the two motives it describes show up in mobbing accounts again and again. One way to read the toxic-triangle idea in an office, and it is our reading rather than something the paper tests, is that the unmet need is most often the need to belong: doubting the group’s story can cost you your place in it.

Add a third factor: joining is cheap, which is Salin’s “low perceived costs” applied to the joiners. When a manager or a popular colleague relays a “concern,” repeating it costs little, and doubting it may cost your place in the group. Many recruits sincerely believe they are passing on something true. The Field Guide entry on flying monkeys describes that role in depth, including why the person carrying the hostility is often not the person who started it.

Why everyone else stays silent

Then there are the witnesses. Darley and Latané (1968) ran a classic experiment in which participants overheard what seemed to be a medical emergency. The more other people they believed were present, the less responsible each felt and the slower they were to report it. The researchers suggested the explanation lies more in the bystander’s response to other observers than in indifference to the victim. It was a lab study of an emergency, so treat the link to offices as an analogy, not proof.

The analogy is a helpful one, though. In a mobbing case, each colleague who says nothing is read by the next as evidence that nothing is wrong. Add fear of becoming the next target, and silence becomes the safest option. Leymann’s third phase adds another twist: when management steps in, it tends to take over the prejudices of the target’s coworkers, so the people with authority to stop it often adopt the group’s view instead. From inside, each witness has a reasonable-sounding thought: it is not my business, maybe I am missing part of the story, and if I speak up I could be next. Each thought is understandable, and together they leave the target alone. The guide for being a useful bystander is written for exactly this moment.

What you can and cannot fix

Understanding the causes gives you a fairer map, and a map is not a rescue. Here is the honest division.

• You cannot fix the organization's incentives, a colleague's reasons for going along, or an instigator's motive. Trying to reason the whole group out of it usually costs more than it returns.
• You can keep a dated, factual record, which the group cannot argue away.
• You can build one or two direct relationships with people who are willing to speak with you privately, since, as the Field Guide's coalition entry notes, coalitions often include people who do not know the full story.
• You can bring the record to someone with the authority to stop it, and if nobody will, you can plan your exit on your own timeline.

It also helps to keep the self-blame question in proportion. Zapf argued that many cases have several causes at once, and Leymann’s definition of the victim is about lost coping resources, not fault. If you are asking “what did I do?”, the research suggests it is rarely the most useful question.

If you want to see how these causes show up as a lived sequence, What Is Mobbing at Work? covers Leymann’s four stages, and Mobbing vs Bullying vs Harassment sorts out the vocabulary.

This post describes patterns, not people. You cannot diagnose a coworker from the outside, and you do not have to. You can understand the pattern, protect yourself, and stop treating what happened as proof of something wrong with you.

Sources

Label note: The toxic triangle and the bystander experiment come from leadership and emergency research and are applied here by analogy to workplace mobbing. Neither is a study of mobbing itself, and nothing here diagnoses any person.