Surviving emotional abuse at workplace

Abstract

Emotional abuse at work can be seen e.g., as rude humour, constant criticism and aggravating or isolating the victim. Emotional abuse at work is a long-term circumstance, which creates long-term effects on the victim’s physical and mental health. The effects of emotional abuse can stay with the victim even after years, and they can affect individual’s ability to cope in their professional and personal life. In addition, emotional abuse cases are financially, reputationally and societally costly for organisations. In Finland organisations have a legal obligation to prevent emotional abuse at work. Still, unfortunately, it is not uncommon to experience emotional abuse at work. The aim of this study was to find out what are the outcomes of emotional abuse at work for individual and how surviving emotional abuse has changed them individually, professionally and personality wise. The study was executed from May 2022 until May 2023. The study included qualitative and quantitative research methods. Questionnaire was shared on LinkedIn on February-March 2023. Questionnaire was answered by 29 respondents. One interview was conducted on Teams in April 2023. Interviewee was a professional who has worked for years in health, safety and security field. The collected data indicated three main entities of surviving emotional abuse at work: the contradictory of feelings after emotional abuse, receiving help from the loved ones and using quitting as a way of overcoming the emotional abuse. While most participants felt emotionally stronger than before the experience, approximately 1/3 of them still felt like the experience limits their life in one way or another. This study is also no exception from the previous ones about the topic, when finding out that quitting is the best alternative to survive emotional abuse at work. Even though positively more than half of the participants received help from their loved ones, the study also showed that 70 % of the victims never received any help from their organisation. This indicates that organisations still have a lot to do when preventing and terminating emotional abuse at workplaces.