"The lack of support was worse than the bullying."
Academic Research
Between 2024 and 2025, I interviewed 12 senior managers who had personally experienced Upward Bullying.
They had done everything right:
- reported,
- documented,
- sought support, &
- followed the process.
But that did not matter!
I used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a rigorous qualitative research method that examines how people make sense of significant experiences in their own lives.
IPA does not try to produce statistics. It produces understanding. It asks:
- what was this actually like, and
- what did it mean to the people who went through it?
Six themes emerged from the analysis. These are not theoretical categories.
Vulnerable
Entry
The conditions were already present before the bullying began.
New roles, inherited team dysfunction, and reduced organisational support created structural vulnerability before a single incident had occurred.
Performance Management as a Catalyst
In most cases, the sustained harmful behaviour began when managers attempted to address performance or enforce standards.
The research confirms this pattern: managing a subordinate’s conduct is the trigger, not the cause.
Malicious Complaints & Narrative Capture
Formal complaints, frequently invoking protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010, followed in close proximity to performance management actions in all twelve cases.
The effect was to shift organisational focus from the subordinate’s conduct to the manager’s.
As one participant described it, they suddenly felt like the accused rather than the person who had raised the original concern.
Institutional Betrayal
All twelve participants reported that the organisational response caused them more harm than the original behaviour.
This is the central finding of the research.
Smith and Freyd (2014), who developed the concept of Institutional Betrayal, describe it as harm caused when an institution fails to meet reasonable expectations of protection, or actively compounds existing harm through its own responses.
That is precisely what these twelve managers described.
Moral
Injury
Ten participants described lasting, fundamental changes to their sense of professional identity and relationship with work.
The concept of Moral Injury, developed by Litz et al. (2009) in military contexts and extended to healthcare by Greenberg (2021), describes the profound distress that results from violations of deeply held moral beliefs.
This research applies it to civilian managerial contexts for the first time and proposes a new concept: Betrayal for Virtue, in which the harm arises not from failing to uphold values but from being punished specifically because you did.
Adaptive
Recovery
Participants found ways through, but not without lasting consequences.
Recovery was not the same as resolution.