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Challenges to Workplace Relationships

Dealing with bullying, romance, and harassment

After my freshman year at the University of Washington, I dropped out of school and went to work driving for a local trucking company. My boss, Rob, delighted in tormenting me. During my initial hiring interview, I made the mistake of telling him how desperately I needed the job, so he knew from the beginning that he had substantial power over me. Several times a week he would call me into his office to verbally abuse me for his amusement—insulting me and swearing at me and then laughing because he knew I couldn’t do anything about it. Rob would assign me impossible tasks, then punish me when I didn’t complete them “on time.” For example, he’d send me to the docks to unload a 45-foot trailer filled with sofas, but wouldn’t let me use a hand truck or forklift. After I’d spent an hour struggling with enormous and weighty boxes, he’d come down and yell at me for “being slow.” He assigned me to a truck that had bad brakes. Once, after parking at a delivery ramp, I came out from signing paperwork to see my truck rolling away down the alley. Like a scene from a bad comedy, I had to run after my truck, desperately trying to catch up to it so I could jump in and stop it with the emergency brake. But Rob’s favorite sport was to threaten to fire me, just to make me beg him for my job (which I did). After six months of daily bullying, I decided that the financial costs of unemployment were preferable to the abuse I was suffering, and I quit.

Maintaining workplace relationships is hard. We must constantly juggle job demands, power issues, and intimacy, all while communicating in ways that are positive and professional (Sias, Heath, Perry, Silva, & Fix, 2004). Yet sometimes even more intense challenges arise. Three of the most common, and difficult to manage, are workplace bullying, the development of romantic relationships with coworkers, and sexual harassment.