When A System Functions from Dysfunction

Our September 2nd article on upward bullying generated conversation because it points to something the research has been documenting for years and most organizations have been ignoring.

One reader put it clearly: "Petulance and contempt can develop when reason and maturity prove ineffective with leadership that does not respect people." Another raised the underlying question: "When a destructive pattern emerges between individuals, how do we distinguish what originates in individual behavior from what the surrounding structure enables, reinforces, or fails to interrupt?"

That question is precisely what the Wild at Work Structural Tell was built to answer.

The wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong treatment.

Addressing a structural problem as though it is an individual conflict, going to HR, having the direct conversation, requesting mediation, does not work when the system itself is the problem. It frequently makes things significantly worse. Understanding which situation you are actually in is the most important professional judgment you will make.

A clear definition of bullying will help to examine structural dynamics that support or mitigate it.

Workplace bullying is repeated, unreasonable behavior directed toward an employee or group of employees that creates a risk to health and safety. Repetition and pattern are core criteria of bullying. A single difficult interaction is a conflict or a bad day.

A sustained, targeted pattern of behavior that the target has difficulty defending themselves against is bullying. That distinction, between isolated incident and systematic conduct, is the foundation of every response framework that follows.

Bullying is an overarching term that includes behaviors across five recognizable categories: the deliberate distortion of reality to undermine a person's confidence in their own perception; exclusion, isolation, and information withholding; public diminishment, credit theft, and blame attribution; the weaponization of policy and process; and workload manipulation designed to set someone up to fail. These behaviors can be enacted by an individual. They can also be enacted by a system.

The literature on systemic workplace bullying has accelerated significantly in 2024 and 2025. Three studies specifically shift the frame from individual behavior to organizational architecture.

1. Research published in the International Journal of Public Sector Management in 2025: Examining 21 senior managers in the Australian public sector, found that organizational culture, performance management systems, and institutional power dynamics do not merely create conditions in which bullying is possible. They actively enable, obscure, and in some cases reward it.

The researchers identified performance management systems as tools that can inadvertently or deliberately hide bullying behaviors behind the language of accountability.

2. A 2025 scoping review published in Nonprofit Management and Leadership found that structural and cultural factors drive a self-perpetuating process involving what researchers call pathological technologies of power, complex power relations embedded in institutional structures that make harmful behavior both possible and difficult to name or address.

The review concluded that a systemic approach is not optional for understanding workplace bullying. It is required.

3. Research published in Human Resource Management in 2025 called explicitly for HRM models that are structurally, institutionally, and ideologically attuned to violence emerging from inequality and institutional complicity.

The authors argue that the existing framing of workplace violence and bullying as primarily interpersonal is inadequate to capture what is actually happening in contemporary organizations.

Performance management systems can inadvertently obscure bullying behaviors. The structure does not just enable the behavior. Sometimes the structure requires the behavior.

The Structural Tell is a Wild at Work proprietary framework developed from peer-reviewed research in organizational psychology, workplace bullying, and institutional dynamics. It provides six diagnostic questions that identify whether the dysfunction is an individual problem or a structural one, or both.

The answer to those questions determines the effective response. Individual problems have individual solutions. Structural problems require a different category of response entirely.

1. Does the behavior survive your professional attempts to address it?

When you raise a concern through appropriate channels, with evidence, with professionalism, and the behavior continues without meaningful consequence, the system is telling you something. Not necessarily that you did it wrong. That the system is protecting the behavior rather than addressing it.

A 2025 study of bullying discourse across organizational types found that in large institutions, workers consistently report systemic helplessness, ie: following reporting, the formal process does not resolve the problem because the formal process is operating within the same structure that produced it.

2. Does it involve more than one actor or level of the organization?

A single difficult person is a personnel issue.

When multiple people at different levels appear to be operating from the same narrative about you, when the story travels from your direct manager to HR to senior leadership without independent verification, you are looking at a structural dynamic, not an interpersonal one.

Research on organizational antecedents of bullying culture consistently identifies this convergence as the marker of institutionally enabled rather than individually originated behavior.

3. Does it predate your specific situation?

Structural bullying has a history. Other people in similar roles, under similar management, in similar circumstances have had similar experiences. When you discover that the pattern predates you, that others before you have moved through versions of the same dynamic, you are not dealing with something you caused or could have prevented. You are encountering a structure that was already in place when you arrived.

4. Is disrespectful behavior pervasive across leadership?

When contempt, dismissiveness, and disrespect are modeled at the senior level and no consequence follows, when the behavior of those at the top sets the behavioral standard for those below, the organization has communicated its values through conduct rather than policy. One disrespectful leader is a personnel issue.

Disrespect that travels down through multiple levels of leadership without interruption is a cultural instruction.

What the organization tolerates at the top indicates exactly what it will tolerate everywhere else.

5. Does promotion appear to require bullying?

In some organizational cultures, advancement is structurally linked to a willingness to engage in the behaviors that characterize toxic management, taking credit for others' work, undermining peers, managing through fear, and maintaining proximity to power through compliance rather than contribution.

When the people who get promoted are consistently the people who exhibit these behaviors, the organization is not failing to address the culture, it is rewarding it.

The promotion pattern is the clearest single indicator of what the organization actually values, regardless of what the values statement says.

6. Is behavior included in performance review?

Organizations that measure only output and ignore conduct have made a structural choice. That choice has consequences. When a high-performing individual who bullies colleagues is protected because of their numbers, the message to the rest of the organization is explicit: results matter, behavior does not.

Research on organizational antecedents of bullying culture consistently identifies the absence of behavioral accountability in performance management as a primary structural enabler.

What gets measured gets managed. What does not get measured gets ignored, until it becomes a crisis.

If the behavior survives your attempts to address it, involves more than one actor, predates your situation, is modeled by leadership, is rewarded through promotion, and is absent from performance review: you are not dealing with a conflict. You are dealing with a system.

Organizations are not passive environments in which bullying happens. They are active systems that either enable or interrupt it.

The research is clear that the organizational response to bullying, or the absence of one, is the single most significant variable in whether the behavior continues and escalates.

Systems that support the bully:

→ Protect high performers regardless of conduct.

→ Promote people who demonstrate aggressive management styles.

→ Allow HR processes to be used as instruments of retaliation against complainants.

→ Fail to include behavioral standards in performance review.

→ Model disrespect at the senior leadership level without consequence.

→ Create ambiguous authority structures that allow power to be exercised informally and unaccountably.

→ Respond to formal complaints with investigations of the complainant rather than the behavior.

The research also notes that it is possible to amend systems that had fallen into supporting a toxic environment. To be clear: That is different from one that knows and profits from it.

Systems that mitigate the bully:

→ Include behavioral expectations explicitly in performance review at every level.

→ Apply the same standards to high performers that they apply to everyone else.

→ Treat formal complaints as information about organizational health, not as threats to manage.

→ Model respectful conduct at the senior level and make the modeling visible.

→ Create safe, truly anonymous reporting mechanisms.

→ Track patterns of complaint, attrition, and team instability by manager and department.

→ Promote people who build others up rather than those who manage through fear.

Organizations that allow structural bullying to continue rarely experience it as a single identifiable cost. They experience it as a pattern of diffuse, seemingly unrelated expenses that accumulate over time until they become impossible to ignore.

$300B lost annually to workplace bullying in the United States alone. (Chapman 2018)

62% of workplace bullying targets lose their jobs, the organization loses them too (WBI 2024).

4 years of longitudinal data shows sustained bullying changes personality (Swiss National Centre Study 2025).

Beyond the financial cost, the research documents a cascade of organizational consequences that structural bullying produces when it goes unaddressed. Psychological safety collapses. High performers, who have options, leave first. The people who remain are either compliant with the culture or too depleted to leave. Institutional knowledge walks out with every departure. Recruitment costs spiral as the employer brand erodes. Legal exposure accumulates as the pattern of behavior becomes documented and discoverable.

The research published in 2026 on toxicity normalization shows that the longer structural bullying goes unaddressed, the more entrenched it becomes and the harder it is to interrupt without significant organizational disruption. The organizations that pay the highest price are not the ones that addressed structural bullying early. They are the ones that waited until the cost became undeniable.

The organizations that retain their best people, their culture, and their institutional knowledge are not the ones that had no bullies. They are the ones whose systems were designed to interrupt bullying before it became the norm.

The research identifies several specific mechanisms through which organizational structures enable and sustain workplace bullying. Naming them, as with any response to bullying, matters because they are frequently presented as legitimate management practices.

Performance Management as Punishment

Performance management systems designed to develop staff become instruments of targeting when they are applied selectively, when criteria shift after delivery, when documentation is created to build a case rather than to support improvement, and when the standards applied to one person differ materially from those applied to others in comparable roles.

Information Deprivation

When access to information necessary for professional functioning is systematically withheld, the impact on the target is both professional and psychological. Research on the Orbit Family of behaviors, exclusion, isolation, information withholding, shows that this mechanism is particularly effective in institutional settings because it can be attributed to organizational efficiency, need-to-know protocols, or simple oversight rather than deliberate targeting.

Process Weaponization

Grievance procedures, HR complaint processes, and formal reporting mechanisms designed to protect employees can become instruments of further harm when they are controlled by the same institutional actors enabling the bullying. Research consistently documents targets who report formally and find themselves subjected to counter-complaints, capability procedures, or restructuring processes that were initiated in direct response to their report. The formal process becomes part of the campaign.

Narrative Capture

The systematic establishment of a negative institutional narrative about the target, communicated through informal channels, embedded in performance documentation, and repeated by multiple actors until it becomes the accepted organizational story, is one of the most damaging and least visible mechanisms of structural bullying. Once the narrative is captured, the target is positioned as the problem. Everything they do to address the situation is interpreted through that damning frame.

If the Structural Tell questions point to a structural rather than individual problem, the response framework changes significantly. This is not a reason to give up. It is a reason to change strategy.

→ Name it as structural in any formal communication. The language matters. 'I am experiencing a pattern of behavior across multiple people and levels of the organization' is categorically different from 'I have a problem with my manager.' It signals that you understand the architecture.

→ Document the pattern, not just the incidents. Individual incidents are dismissable. A dated, specific, witnessed record of interactions across multiple actors and time points is significantly harder to manage away.

→ Seek external advice before engaging internal processes further. When the internal processes are part of the structure, using them without external guidance consistently accelerates the harm. An employment lawyer, union representative, or experienced external advisor should review the situation before you take the next formal step.

→ Understand your timeline deliberately. Structural dynamics rarely resolve quickly. Making a strategic decision about how long you are able to invest in addressing the situation, financially, psychologically, professionally, is not defeat. It is professional judgment.

Managers who suspect that what is happening on or around their team is structural rather than interpersonal face a specific challenge: The very systems they would normally use to address the problem may be part of it.

→ The question is not only what the individual is doing. The question is what the organization is permitting, enabling, or requiring.

→ Research from the Australian public sector study found that organizational change processes, restructuring, reform, new management mandates, create specific windows during which bullying behaviors escalate because accountability structures are in flux. If your team is experiencing dysfunction during or after a significant organizational change, the change itself may be a structural factor.

→ Managers who identify structural problems and attempt to address them individually, through direct management of the behavior without addressing the institutional conditions producing it, consistently find the behavior returns. Structural intervention requires naming the structural conditions to the people who have the authority to change them, daunting in a context where toxicity is the baseline state.

→ This is also why poor reactions from staff at all levels can develop not from individual character but from accumulated experience of raising concerns that go nowhere. The behavior is a symptom. The structure and those that buy into it or are cowed by it, for whatever reason, are the cause.

The most powerful intervention in structural bullying is identification before entry. Five questions, asked directly in an interview or during due diligence on a new role, reveal more about organizational structure than any amount of employer branding.

1. How are decisions made here? A healthy organization can describe this clearly. Vagueness, deflection, or the sudden introduction of complexity signals that decision-making is informal, concentrated, or protected.

2. What does accountability look like when something goes wrong? Organizations with functioning accountability can describe a process. Organizations where accountability is selective cannot.

3. Can you tell me about someone who raised a formal concern and what happened? Watch for the pivot. The introduction of confidentiality as a reason not to answer is itself an answer.

4. How long did the previous person in this role stay, and where are they now? Turnover patterns in a specific role or under a specific manager are not coincidences. They are data.

5. What does success look like here and how is it recognized? Vague references to culture fit, loyalty, and going above and beyond in place of clear, transparent criteria describe an organization where advancement is based on proximity to power rather than contribution.

This article has introduced the framework. The guide goes further. It covers all six diagnostic questions in full, the five structural markers with relevant lines of inquiry and a documentation checklist, specific recourse strategies for targets, allies, and managers already inside the organization, the Narrative Capture Recovery framework, scripts for the formal conversations, and the complete response framework for escalation and exit.

→ The five structural markers in complete detail: Isolation, Coordinated Pressure, Information Withholding, Disproportionate Monitoring, and Selective Standards, each with specific prompts and identifiers to build a formal record. The guide includes templates for that record.

→ A five-marker checklist formatted as a documentation record, ready to take into an HR meeting or legal consultation.

→ Specific scripts, templates, and plans of action for the Target, Ally, and Manager who are aware of and caught up in the structural web of dysfunction.

→ The Narrative Capture Recovery framework: A step-by-step process to interrupt the negative institutional narrative that has been established about you and build your professional counter-record.

→ Two complete response frameworks: documentation for escalation and documentation for exit, with the specific steps each requires.

→ The Non-Negotiables: What must be protected regardless of whether you stay or go.

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