The bully, the bullied and the customer

By J. N. Halm

It never occurred to her that her commitment to the job was going to get her into such trouble. New to the department, she was bent on doing her very best. But unfortunately for her, coming to work before everyone else, staying after hours to finish her work and staying respectful to everyone were the very things that got her into the bad books of some of her superiors. Their response was to target her and to make her feel as unwelcome as possible.

There were times she would walk in on a conversation among her colleagues and the conversation would end abruptly. There was this one time when she needed to use the washroom and could not find the key. She was told the one with the key was not around. She therefore had to go two floors down to find another place of convenience. Gradually, the bullying became unbearable and she had other choice but to lodge a formal complaint to the Head of Department.

There is a saying that hurt people hurt people. It is one of those statements that sounds deceptively simple on the surface but contains a world of psychological truth within it. Most people, when they hear it, nod their heads in agreement. Yet, in our workplaces across this country, we fail to act on what this simple statement implies. We allow bullying to happen, we watch victims suffer in silence, and then we wonder why workplace culture deteriorates and customer service keeps declining.

Let me explain what I mean.

In most organisations, when we think about workplace bullying, our attention naturally gravitates toward the person being bullied. We think of the suffering, the loss of confidence, the reduced productivity. What we rarely stop to consider is what the bullied employee does with all that pain. Where does it go? The truth of the matter is that pain, especially the kind born of humiliation and fear, has to go somewhere. And very often, it travels in directions that the organisation never anticipated.

A recent study published in the November 2025 edition of the Journal of Service Theory and Practice has thrown considerable light on this issue. The study, titled “Workplace bullying and the enacted incivility of those targeted: the roles of anger, shame and fear,” examined 328 hotel employees in Jordan. Using what is known as Affective Event Theory — a framework that examines how events in the workplace trigger emotional responses that then influence behaviour — the researchers found that employees who were bullied at work did not simply absorb the abuse and move on. Instead, they became perpetrators of a different kind of bad behaviour themselves. The term the researchers used is “enacted incivility” — uncivil, rude, or disrespectful behaviour that the bullied employee directs at others in the workplace.

What makes this study particularly compelling is the way it unpacks the emotional pathway from bullying to incivility. The researchers found that it is not the bullying itself, directly, that leads to the uncivil behaviour. Rather, it is the negative emotions the bullying stirs up — specifically, anger and shame — that serve as the bridge between being a victim and becoming an aggressor.

Think about that for a moment. An employee is bullied, perhaps by a supervisor or a senior colleague. The employee feels angry — a natural, outward-directed emotion. That anger has to find an outlet. And because the employee cannot direct the anger at the person responsible for it — the bully, who likely holds power over them — the anger finds easier targets. A junior colleague. A co-worker. Even a customer. Then there is shame, which is an inward-directed emotion. Shame makes the individual feel diminished, worthless, inadequate. Paradoxically, one way of dealing with shame is to act in a way that diminishes others. It is as if pulling others down to one’s level momentarily eases the pain of feeling low.

Interestingly, the study found that fear — another emotion one would naturally associate with being bullied — did not produce the same effect. Fear, it turns out, tends to make people freeze rather than act out. It is anger and shame that push people toward uncivil behaviour.

There is something the researchers call “trait self-control” that plays a moderating role in this dynamic. Employees who have higher levels of self-control are better able to contain the emotional fallout of being bullied. They may feel the anger and shame just as intensely, but their ability to regulate their responses means that those emotions are less likely to manifest as incivility. This is a very important finding because it suggests that the cycle is not inevitable. It can be interrupted.

Now, all of this has very direct implications for businesses in Ghana. We live in a country where hierarchical structures are deeply embedded in organisational life. The idea of a boss who can say or do whatever they like to subordinates is, unfortunately, still very much alive. In many organisations, bullying is not even recognised as such. It hides behind phrases like “tough management”, “high standards” or “pushing for results”. What we do not realise is that while we are busy being “tough”, we are setting off a chain reaction of negative emotions and behaviours that ripple through the entire organisation.

Consider the service implications. Ghana is a country that aspires to become a significant services economy. Our banking sector, hospitality industry, health sector, retail, and telecommunications all depend on frontline employees who must deliver quality service to customers daily. What happens when the employee serving you at the bank counter has just been humiliated by a supervisor? What is the customer experience when the hotel front desk officer is silently seething from a dressing-down they received that morning? The answer, according to the science, is not a good one.

In Ghana’s service sector specifically, the stakes are particularly high. Unlike in manufacturing, where a disgruntled employee’s emotional state can be somewhat shielded from the final product, in services, the employee is the product. The interaction between the customer and the frontline employee IS the service. When that employee is carrying the emotional wreckage of a bullying encounter, the customer bears the brunt of it, whether or not anyone intended that to happen.

One thing that makes the findings of this study universally applicable — even though the data was collected in Jordan — is the basic human psychology at the heart of it. Anger and shame are not culturally specific emotions. A Ghanaian employee, a Jordanian employee, an American employee: when bullied, all of them will feel anger. All of them will feel shame. The question is always what happens next.

The practical recommendations from this study are ones that Ghanaian organisations should take seriously. The researchers call for clear anti-bullying policies and proper training in emotion regulation and conflict management. They also recommend targeted interventions and counselling for employees who have been targeted by bullying.

In Ghana, the idea of an employer providing counselling or mental health support to employees is still relatively novel. Many of our organisations have not yet made that cultural shift from viewing employees purely as labour inputs to viewing them as human beings whose psychological wellbeing has a direct bearing on business outcomes. But the evidence keeps piling up, and it points in one direction: organisations that do not invest in the emotional health of their workforce pay for it in ways they may not even be able to measure.

It has been said many times that what you do not know cannot hurt you. In the world of organisational management, that statement is simply false. What many business owners and managers in this country do not know about the effects of workplace bullying is hurting them every single day — through poor customer service, increased absenteeism, higher staff turnover, and declining organisational morale.

Our good friend from the opening paragraph confesses that at the height of the bullying, she felt like quitting. She could not come to terms with the fact that she had done nothing wrong to her colleagues and yet they were bent on making life unbearable for her. After her report, the Head of Department called a meeting and did his best to resolve the issue. The bullies eventually got off her back. She has tried her best to stay committed to the job and not allow their negative attitudes to get to her, but the damage had been done. She wonders if she can ever trust those individuals.

Workplace bullying is a reality but it is mostly wrongly perceived as a management style. The advice is that the next time a manager or supervisor thinks that being aggressive toward a subordinate is an effective management style, he or she should pause and consider what is really being set in motion. The pain bullies inflict does not disappear. It simply changes form — and very often, it is the customer, and ultimately the business itself, that ends up paying the price.

Hurt people, as we know, hurt people. It is time our organisations started taking that truth seriously.

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