Incivility, Bullying, and Harassment in the Workplace

A practical guide to understanding, identifying, and preventing offensive behaviours at work.

Dr. Georgi Toma  |  Director, HeartBrain Works  |  Honorary Research Fellow, University of Auckland 

Introduction

Offensive behaviours at work — whether they take the form of a sharp remark, sustained bullying, or sexual harassment — are among the most damaging psychosocial hazards an organisation can face. Their costs are not only human, though the human cost is always the most significant. They ripple outward into productivity, collaboration, staff retention, and ultimately the organisation's ability to serve its clients and fulfil its purpose.

This article is drawn from a webinar delivered to health and safety professionals as part of HeartBrain Works' Psychosocial Hazards Focus series. Rather than treating offensive behaviours as isolated incidents requiring reactive responses, the session approached them as systemic risks that organisations have both a legal and moral obligation to prevent. What follows is a comprehensive guide to understanding the spectrum of offensive behaviours, recognising their prevalence and cost, and building the systems needed to address them.

A note before we begin: some of the themes covered in this article — including harassment, sexual harassment, and workplace trauma — may be difficult for some readers. If you find yourself needing support, Lifeline is available by phone or text in both Australia (13 11 14) and New Zealand (0800 543 354).

The Spectrum of Offensive Behaviours: Incivility, Bullying, and Harassment

When we talk about offensive behaviours in the workplace, most people immediately think of bullying or harassment. These are the terms that appear in legislation, codes of practice, and formal complaints processes. But there is a third category — one that tends to be overlooked — that deserves equal attention: incivility.

Incivility

Incivility describes social encounters that convey disrespect with low intensity and ambiguous intent. The ambiguity is important: unlike bullying or harassment, incivility often involves behaviours where it is not entirely clear whether the instigator intended to cause harm. A sharp tone in a meeting, being talked over, a dismissive response to an idea — none of these acts are unambiguous, and none of them, taken in isolation, would constitute bullying. But that does not make them harmless.

Incivility spreads through workplaces like a contagion. Research describes an incivility spiral: when one person perceives they have been treated with disrespect, they experience a sense of injustice, followed by negative emotion, followed by a desire to reciprocate. Most of the time, they act on that desire. The original instigator then perceives their treatment as disrespectful, the cycle begins again, and with each repetition it intensifies. What began as a thoughtless remark can escalate, over time, into something far more serious.

Crucially, incivility is a workgroup phenomenon, not an individual character flaw. When a person behaves in uncivil ways, it is because they are operating within a system that permits it. Blaming the behaviour on a particular individual's personality — or, as happens frequently in cross-cultural teams, on their cultural background — misses the point entirely. The question is not why this person is like this. The question is what conditions in the organisation allow it to continue.

There are three reasons incivility deserves explicit attention in any psychosocial risk assessment. First, asking about incivility tends to generate more candid responses from workers than asking directly about bullying or harassment, both of which can feel like larger and more consequential words to use. Second, incivility functions as an early warning signal — a canary in the coal mine — that something in the work environment is not working. Third, its costs are significant, and we will return to those shortly.

Bullying

Bullying is defined consistently across both Safe Work Australia and WorkSafe New Zealand as repeated and unreasonable behaviour directed towards a worker or a group of workers that creates a risk to health and safety. Two words carry most of the legal weight here: repeated and unreasonable. Bullying is not a one-off incident — it is a pattern. And it is behaviour that a reasonable person in the same circumstances would recognise as inappropriate.

Bullying can be verbal, physical, or digital. It includes abusive or intimidating language, belittling or humiliating comments, unjustified criticism, social exclusion, rumour spreading, and withholding information or resources a person needs to do their job. It is worth noting explicitly that performance management is not bullying. Constructive, formative feedback delivered appropriately falls within the legitimate remit of workplace management. The distinction matters, because conflating the two can make managers reluctant to address genuine performance issues, and can make workers hesitant to accept appropriate feedback.

A one-off incident of disrespectful behaviour is better characterised as incivility. When that behaviour becomes a pattern — repeated, unreasonable, and directed at a person or group — it crosses into bullying territory.

Harassment and Sexual Harassment

Harassment is behaviour that is unwelcome, unsolicited, and offensive, humiliating, or intimidating, and that relates to a protected attribute — gender, race, age, sexuality, disability, religion, pregnancy, or similar characteristics. The definition is consistent across Australian and New Zealand jurisdictions.

Sexual harassment warrants particular attention for several reasons. The risk of psychological harm is high. The prevalence in Australian and New Zealand workplaces is significant. And there is now, as of December last year, a Model Code of Practice for Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment released by Comcare — a fresh and practical document that is currently being considered for adoption across multiple jurisdictions. WHS professionals are strongly encouraged to read it.

Sexual harassment is defined as any unwelcome sexual advance, request for sexual favours, or conduct of a sexual nature that makes a person feel offended, humiliated, or intimidated, where a reasonable person would anticipate that reaction. Two things are worth emphasising here. First, intent is irrelevant: "I didn't mean it that way" does not constitute a defence. Second, employers have a positive duty of care in many jurisdictions, meaning that reactive measures — responding to complaints after the fact — are not sufficient. Prevention is a legal obligation.

How Prevalent Are These Behaviours?

The answer, for anyone working in Australia or New Zealand, is sobering.

The World Risk Poll, a global survey of 121,000 employees across 121 countries conducted by Lloyd's Register Foundation and Gallup, found that Australia ranked first in the world for workplace violence and harassment, with 49.1% of respondents reporting having experienced it in the past five years. Women (53.3%) reported slightly higher rates than men (44.8%). New Zealand ranked fourth, with 42% of respondents reporting similar experiences.

This ranking often surprises people, and it is worth understanding what it does and does not mean. The countries that appear at the top of this list — Australia, New Zealand, Nordic nations like Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and Norway — also tend to be countries with greater public awareness of what constitutes unacceptable behaviour, clearer legislation against it, and stronger cultural norms of reporting. Countries at the bottom of the list may not have less harassment; they may simply have greater normalisation of it and fewer avenues through which people feel safe to report it.

Closer to home, WorkSafe New Zealand data from 2021 shows that one in five New Zealand workers reported bullying annually, and one in three reported harassment. The Australian Human Rights Commission's Time for Respect report — now in its fifth national iteration — found that one in three Australians have been sexually harassed at work in the past five years, affecting not only women (41%) but men as well. Only one in five people who experienced sexual harassment made a formal report or complaint. Of those who did, 40% said that no changes occurred at their workplace as a result. These numbers help explain why sexual harassment remains so chronically underreported: when coming forward carries personal and professional risk, and when doing so rarely produces meaningful change, silence becomes the rational choice.

The Cost of Offensive Behaviours

Before turning to prevention, it is worth naming the costs — because the business case for action is as compelling as the ethical and legal one.

Research by Porath and Pearson, published in the Harvard Business Review, quantified the impact of incivility on worker behaviour. Among workers who had been on the receiving end of uncivil behaviour, 48% intentionally decreased their work effort, 47% decreased the time they spent at work, and 38% intentionally decreased the quality of their work. Eighty percent lost work time ruminating about the incident. Sixty-six percent reported that their performance declined, and 78% said their commitment to the organisation declined. Twelve percent left the job as a direct result of the uncivil treatment. And 25% admitted to taking their frustration out on customers.

Beyond incivility, a landmark study was able to quantify the cost of bullying in a single government organisation at 180 million USD — a figure that speaks for itself. The estimated cost of workers' compensation claims related to sexual harassment in Australia in the 2022 financial year was 16 billion dollars. These are financial figures. They do not capture the distress experienced by individuals who have been targeted, or the toll carried by their families. The human cost comes first.

Identifying Offensive Behaviours in Your Organisation

Identification begins with honest reflection. Consider: have you noticed offensive behaviours in your organisation? Are you aware of any complaints that have been made? In practice, the answer to the first question is almost always yes — organisations with zero incivility are extraordinarily rare — and the true picture of bullying and harassment is typically worse than formal complaint records suggest.

A useful framework for identification is to think systematically about where, when, how, and who.

• Where might offensive behaviours occur, both in physical workspaces and online? W
• hen are they most likely — at high-pressure points in the month, in particular shift patterns, during performance review cycles?
• How do they manifest — verbally, physically, through text messages or teams communications?
• Who might be most affected?

This last question deserves particular attention. Workers at higher risk include those with limited work experience (young workers, apprentices, new recruits), workers with barriers to understanding safety information due to language or literacy, workers with insecure or precarious employment, workers with certain attributes — gender, race, age, sexuality, disability, pregnancy — that make them targets of discriminatory behaviour, and workers in client-facing roles. Anyone whose job involves regular interaction with the public should be considered at elevated risk; offensive behaviour from clients or customers is, regrettably, foreseeable.

Methods of identification include anonymous surveys, focus groups, interviews, review of existing records (grievances, complaints, exit interview data, EAP records), and direct observation of work design and workplace interactions. Several cautions apply here. Workers are significantly more likely to disclose sensitive information to an external provider managing a genuinely anonymous process than to an internal survey. Psychosocial risk assessments should not be bundled with engagement or health monitoring surveys — they have a different purpose, a different legal basis, and mixing them confuses both the audience and the data. And wherever possible, consider whether your reporting channels are actually known and trusted by your people, and whether they are trauma-informed — that is, designed to support rather than further distress the people who use them.

Our audits at HeartBrain Works, conducted across organisations in Australia and New Zealand, consistently find that approximately 53% of workers have experienced or witnessed incivility in the past year. Bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, are routinely underreported in formal channels but surface clearly when the data is examined carefully — often embedded within examples that workers describe as "just disrespect."

Preventing Offensive Behaviours: Six Principles

Reactive responses — investigating complaints after the fact — are necessary but insufficient. Effective prevention requires a proactive, systems-level approach. Six principles are particularly important.

Leadership commitment is the foundation. In organisations where leadership genuinely does not tolerate offensive behaviour, the culture reflects that. The problem is rarely that leaders are deliberately permitting harm. More often, they are unaware of the extent to which certain behaviours are affecting the organisation, or they are tacitly allowing a high performer to continue behaving badly because the performance is easier to see than the damage. Making the cost of that behaviour visible is part of the WHS professional's role.

Consult your staff in a genuinely unbiased manner. The quality of your data depends entirely on whether people feel safe providing it. If workers do not believe their answers are truly anonymous and consequence-free, your numbers will be artificially low and your risk profile will be inaccurate.

Train your managers. Line managers are the people most likely to observe offensive behaviour early, most positioned to address it directly, and most responsible for the team culture in which it either thrives or is suppressed. Training managers to identify offensive behaviour, respond appropriately, and carry out their legal obligations is one of the highest-leverage investments an organisation can make.

Offer a variety of reporting channels, including an anonymous option. The concern that anonymous reports cannot be followed up has a practical solution: there are providers who act as intermediaries, enabling a person to report anonymously while still allowing the organisation to communicate with them. Anonymous reporting channels are not a workaround — they are often the only channel through which workers will feel safe.

Apply policies consistently. Nothing erodes trust faster than a complaints process that produces different outcomes depending on who the subject of the complaint is. If policies are not applied consistently — regardless of seniority, performance, or relationships — workers will conclude that the process does not work, and they will stop using it.

Create trauma-informed processes. A complaints process that is not trauma-informed can compound the harm experienced by the person making the complaint. In plain terms: the process should not put the person through further distress, should be clear and transparent, and should give the person a genuine sense that action will follow.

A Case Study: What Systematic Action Can Achieve

A Case Study: What Systematic Action Can Achieve

To illustrate what this approach looks like in practice, consider an organisation in a male-dominated industry that came to us with three presenting problems: high staff turnover, poor team collaboration affecting client deliverables, and no existing data on psychosocial hazards. When we conducted an audit, we found that 79% of staff had witnessed or experienced incivility — a very high figure — and that 34% had experienced bullying or harassment. Compounding these results were high job demands, significant role conflict between teams, unclear processes around client deliverables, and an entrenched culture of siloed working.

Rather than treating these as separate problems, we worked with the organisation to address the underlying causes systematically. Interventions included a structured program on incivility, respect, and collaboration — giving people a shared language and clear understanding of what the organisation considers appropriate and what the internal procedures are when those standards are breached — as well as targeted work on role clarity, process design, and resourcing.

One year later, the follow-up audit showed a 31% reduction in incivility rates, a 23% reduction in bullying and harassment rates, and a 47% improvement in perceptions of support from line managers and organisational justice. Organisational justice — the extent to which workers feel the organisation treats them fairly — is a particularly sensitive indicator, because it predicts willingness to engage, to report, and to trust that future assessments will lead to real change.

Conclusion: From Recognition to Action

Incivility, bullying, and harassment are not edge cases. They are pervasive features of Australian and New Zealand workplaces, backed by data that is difficult to dispute. Their costs — in human suffering, in lost productivity, in workers' compensation claims, in staff turnover — are significant and measurable. And they are not intractable. They respond to systematic, committed, well-designed intervention.

The path forward begins with honest identification: understanding what is happening in your organisation, where, and to whom. It continues with building systems — consultation processes, reporting channels, policies, training — that are fit for purpose and genuinely trusted by your people. And it requires leadership that understands not only what the legislation requires, but why it matters.

If this work feels complex or you are not sure where to start, we are here to help.

If this work feels complex or you are not sure where to start, we are here to help. Get in touch with us! 

References

Porath, C., & Pearson, C. (2013). The price of incivility. Harvard Business Review, 91(1–2), 115–121.

Australian Human Rights Commission. (2022). Time for respect: Fifth national survey on sexual harassment in Australian workplaces. AHRC.

Lloyd's Register Foundation & Gallup. (2021). The Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll: A world of risk. Gallup.

WorkSafe New Zealand. (2021). Preventing and responding to bullying at work. WorkSafe NZ.

Toma, G. (2026). Psychosocial Risk Management for a Healthier Workplace: A Practical Implementation Guide. Routledge.

About the Author 

Dr. Georgi Toma is the Director of HeartBrain Works and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland. With over a decade of experience in psychosocial risk, occupational stress, and culture interventions, Georgi has supported high-profile clients including Myer, RMIT University, Uber, Hitachi Energy, Clough Group, MEC Mining, and Environment Canterbury to create mentally healthy workplaces. HeartBrain Works offers validated psychosocial risk audits, training for leaders and staff, and the scientifically validated Wellbeing Protocol. 

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