"As management professionals know, enabling a bully damages a work culture. As the Stanford business professor Robert Sutton points out in his book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (2010), one organization calculated that in one year it had paid over $160,000 in costs associated with a workplace bully. This cost did not include the “suffering and heartache, so much time wasted by talented people”, and the “emotional and physical toll on witnesses and bystanders”.
The company decided to deduct the money lost from the bully’s violent behaviors from his compensation, shifting some of the consequences of the anti-social, violent behavior back on to the bully. Notably, this is very different from strategies that shielded Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and other media figures, in which the corporation made a continuing investment in the bully by paying complainants off, disposing of them, and hiring new employees.
Perhaps a more important outcome of fining the bully is to shift the stigma to the bully...
Many victims report intense fear as they try to process an encounter in the moment, a fear that is so intense it results in a feeling frozen, paralyzed, or leaving their own bodies...
Investing in the health of the many rather than knuckling under to the most powerful among us is not only the key to ending sexual harassment, it charts a clear path to a workplace that says no to bullying."
