Call for participants: narratives on emotional workplace abuse - towards responsible workplaces

Have you encountered or experienced emotional workplace abuse in your current or previous workplaces?
Have you been the target of emotional workplace abuse, or have you noticed emotional abuse or inappropriate behaviour targeted to others in the workplace?

We are interested in how emotional abuse is manifested in the workplace, how emotional abuse is handled, and how organizations interfere in its occurrence. We are calling for participants to narrate their experiences and perceptions regarding emotional abuse in the workplace.

We define emotional abuse as systematic and long-term maltreatment, which can be targeted to work tasks (for example withholding knowledge, isolating from meetings and other common situations in the workplace, devaluing the quality of work tasks) and/or to the person themselves (spreading rumours behind one’s back, turning other employees against the target, yelling, aggressive behaviour, making fun of and publicly embarrassing the target in front of others). Emotional abuse can also be indirect and subtle, and it can be manifested through an intermediary.

You can use the following questions:

- How did the inappropriate behaviour manifest? What forms did the emotional abuse take?

- Did the abuse have something to do with gender, ethnicity, cultural background, appearance or other attributes?

- How did people react to the abuse?

- Did you or someone else contact a manager, health and safety representative, human resources or others for help and support?

- What effects did that have?

- Did you receive help or support from somewhere for identifying and surviving the abusive experiences?

- What happened to the abuser? Did the situation change in any way?

- Have the experiences affected your career development? How?

Instructions

You can write about your experiences in the text box below, or alternatively you can upload a text file at the bottom of the page. Background information is important for research, but you are not obligated to answer any of the questions.

If you want to include an attachment, choose:
“I want to send an attachment / attachments.” and press “Submit”. After this, you can choose an attachment from your computer by clicking “Browse” and “Upload file”.
When the file is uploaded, click “Submit data”.

Narrative

Tell us about your experiences

The maximum character limit for the text box above is 32 000 characters. We recommend writing your text with a word processing program and copying it to the box. Alternatively you can submit your text as an attachment file on the next page.

Background information

Pseudonym

Gender

Year of birth

Education

Position at the time of the events

Age at the time of the events

Duration of the events

Industry

Size of the organization

More information

Proceed

The Emotional Workpalce Abuse project is pursued at the Gender Studies discipline at University of Helsinki and lead by Associated Professor Marjut Jyrkinen with Adjunct Professor Elina Penttinen. The project is done in collaboration with Associate Professor Kathy Sanderson (Lakehead University Canada). All collected data and personal information is handled confidentially. Any information regarding an individual subject or organization will not be disclosed publicly in any way.