How Deep Culture and Deep Structure Sustain Workplace Bullying
Introduction
In modern workplaces, bullying is often addressed as if it were an interpersonal misunderstanding, a clash of styles, or a “difficult personality.” Yet bullying persists precisely because it is rarely just a surface-level behavior problem. It is a system problem, and it becomes legible when viewed through Johan Galtung’s (2003) concept of the “deeper layer” beneath visible conflict.
Workplace bullying is rarely linear. It unfolds in a complex field of power, incentives, loyalties, fears, and unspoken rules, where meanings are negotiated quietly and where the most decisive drivers are often the least visible. In these environments, the issue is not only what individuals do; it is what the organization repeatedly permits, rewards, reclassifies, or quietly absorbs, often by shifting the costs into the target’s body, career, and social standing.
Johan Galtung’s concept of a “deeper layer” beneath visible conflict offers a precise language for this problem. It shifts the focus away from incident-by-incident debates toward the deeper forces that shape what is recognized as harm, what becomes actionable, and whose needs are treated as negotiable, thereby rendering workplace bullying legible as a systemic phenomenon rather than a private dispute.
What Galtung’s “Deeper Layer” Reveals About Organizations and Bullying
Johan Galtung (1930–2024) is widely recognized as a foundational scholar in peace research and conflict studies. Across his work, a consistent theme is that conflicts are not synonymous with violence: conflict is a normal feature of human and social life, while violence is the preventable escalation that produces harm. In his Council of Europe paper, Rethinking Conflict: The Cultural Approach, Galtung (2003) offers a compact, practical framework for analyzing conflicts that avoids the common trap of focusing solely on the visible.
He begins with the ABC triangle of conflict: A for attitudes (emotions and cognitions), B for behavior (what people do), and C for contradiction (the underlying incompatibility of goals). Galtung (2003) emphasizes that conflict is a complex human phenomenon and should not be confused with violence. The move to the “deeper layer” is therefore a complexity move: it invites us to look beneath visible incidents to the deeper, often unarticulated forces that drive what people perceive, justify, and repeat.
Importantly, he then argues that in many conflicts, especially protracted ones, there is “a deeper layer to the ABC-triangle,” one that often escapes articulation because it is repressed, habitual, or treated as “obvious.” To approach that deeper layer, he proposes giving them other names: deep cultures, basic needs, and deep structures. This conceptual shift is the hinge on which our understanding of why workplace bullying persists turns, even when organizations have policies, values statements, and formal procedures.
Why “Deeper Layer” Fits Workplace Bullying so Well
Workplace bullying is often reduced to surface explanations: personality clashes, miscommunication, oversensitivity, or the repeated, targeted mistreatment by a single individual (Einarsen et al., 2020). Bullying endures when the surrounding system makes it easier to manage the disruption than to address the enabling conditions: power imbalances that limit a target’s ability to defend themselves, informal protections around high-status actors, incentive structures that reward short-term output over relational accountability, and cultural norms that minimize harm or rename it as “directness,” “performance,” or “fit.” In these environments, the issue is not only what individuals do; it is what the organization repeatedly permits, rewards, reclassifies, or quietly absorbs, often by shifting the costs into the target’s body, career, and social standing.
However, when bullying persists, especially when reporting fails or backfires, it signals deeper forces: organizational meanings that normalize harm, structures that protect power, and basic human needs that are repeatedly violated without repair. This is why a purely interpersonal frame is often ineffective. Bullying is shaped by power imbalances and organizational responses, not only by individual disposition, and is therefore best analyzed as a phenomenon occurring across individual, relational, and systemic levels (Einarsen et al., 2020).
Galtung’s (2003) model matters in the workplace because it reorients the inquiry. Instead of asking only, “What happened between these two people?” it also asks: What cultural assumptions make this seem tolerable? What structures make it costly to confront? And which basic needs are being sacrificed to maintain stability?
The Surface Layer: The ABC Triangle at Work
In a workplace bullying scenario, the ABC triangle is usually easy to spot once named:
Attitudes (A): fear of retaliation, contempt, cynicism, apathy, moral disengagement, or shame-based reactivity.
Behavior (B): humiliation, intimidation, social exclusion, rumor-spreading, sabotage, micromanagement, public devaluation, or cold procedural distancing.
Contradiction (C): incompatible goals that often remain implicit (e.g., an employee’s need for dignity and safety versus a leader’s demand for dominance, or an organization’s claim of psychological safety versus its prioritization of reputational control).
If intervention stays at the ABC surface, organizations tend to focus on communication training, mediation, or “resetting relationships,” while leaving deeper drivers untouched (Galtung, 2003).
Deep Structures: How Harm Becomes “System-Consistent”
Galtung’s (2003) term “deep structures” points to durable arrangements that shape outcomes beyond individual intention. In organizations, deep structures include hierarchy, dependency, incentive systems, promotion logics, complaint architectures, legal risk containment, and the informal reality of who is protected and who is expendable. Large organizations are often siloed in ways that restrict information flow and weaken shared accountability, which in turn can make scapegoating and distorted sensemaking easier under pressure. These structures can make certain harms predictable: if confronting a powerful perpetrator is costly to the organization, the path of least resistance becomes reframing, minimizing, delaying, or isolating the complainant.
When these arrangements reward results while shielding status, they can select for leadership styles that achieve goals through fear, coercion, and degradation rather than through legitimate authority (Einarsen et al., 2007).
This is where destructive leadership becomes predictable rather than mysterious. Destructive leadership has been defined as systematic and repeated leader behavior that violates the legitimate interests of the organization and/or harms subordinates’ well-being and job satisfaction (Einarsen et al., 2007). When structures reward short-term output, charisma, and conflict suppression, while under-resourcing training, oversight, and accountability, destructive leadership can persist not because no one knows it is harmful, but because the system is not built to contain it (Einarsen et al., 2007).
Deep structures also explain why reporting can become dangerous. If complaint-handling systems are implicitly oriented toward liability management and reputation protection, then an employee’s pain is processed primarily as institutional risk, and the question silently shifts from “What happened to this person?” to “What exposure does this create for the organization?” (Edelman & Talesh, 2011). In that structural logic, minimizing, reframing, delaying, and narrowing the issue become not individual cruelty but system-consistent strategies (Edelman & Talesh, 2011). Over time, this containment logic stabilizes the organization by relocating the conflict’s consequences onto the complainant, through isolation, stalled careers, reputational damage, and embodied stress.
In this sense, workplace bullying is not merely something that occurs within a system; it can become something the system quietly absorbs by shifting the cost to the body, career, and social belonging of the targeted person (Galtung, 2003). This absorption often accelerates under pressure, when complexity is misread as crisis: organizations “tighten” rather than widen, decision-making narrows, corridors close, and command-and-control becomes normalized. Such conditions can intensify scapegoating, silence, and retaliation rather than improving judgment. In complex situations, however, organizations typically need broader consultation and slower, more reality-based sensemaking.
Deep Culture: The Invisible Rules About What Is Real
For Galtung (2003), “deep culture” is the layer of unspoken assumptions that steer perception and legitimacy: what counts as credible, severe, normal, shameful, or “not worth escalating.” In workplaces, deep culture often manifests as minimization scripts (“that’s just her style”), conflict-avoidance norms, and status beliefs (“results matter more than relational damage”). It also appears in what is unsayable: when naming bullying threatens the organization’s self-image, the culture pressures people to downgrade meaning, turning harm into “miscommunication” or “a difficult fit.”
Many workplaces also operate through what could be called ghost expectations: demands that were never explicitly discussed or mutually agreed upon, yet later become the basis for criticism or punishment. When expectations are not made discussable, power becomes retroactive, and targets are evaluated against rules they were never allowed to see. This dynamic is functionally adaptive within bullying-enabling cultures because ambiguity can be converted into blame while preserving plausible deniability.
Deep culture is also gendered, because many organizations inherit histories of masculine-coded norms—emotional restraint, toughness, dominance—and these norms shape what leaders interpret as “serious,” what is framed as “overreacting,” and which injuries are treated as legitimate harm versus interpersonal noise (Hecker, 2025). Research on conceptualizations of workplace bullying has shown that perceptions and thresholds can differ by gender: in Escartín et al.’s (2011) studies, women emphasized emotional abuse and professional discredit more than men did in their definitions of bullying, and women tended to rate many negative acts as more severe than men did.
Galtung (2003) emphasizes that deep cultural layers often escape formulation because they are repressed or taken too much for granted, which is why minimization can feel automatic, even rational, to bystanders and leaders. Once minimization becomes culturally normal, it does not merely silence targets; it reorganizes reality by narrowing what can be named, what can be corrected, and what will reliably trigger protection.
Basic Needs: Why Bullying Becomes Traumatic and Enduring
Galtung (2003) places “basic needs” at the deeper layer because conflicts become especially entrenched when fundamental needs are threatened. Workplace bullying directly undermines needs such as safety, dignity, belonging, agency, fairness, and reality validation (“my experience is recognized as real”).
When those needs are violated due to power imbalances and when organizational responses fail to repair the harm, the injury often becomes more than “stress.” It becomes a destabilization of trust and an embodied expectation that power will not protect. This is one reason bullying often has long aftereffects: the nervous system learns not only that danger exists, but that appeals for protection may be ignored or punished.
This bridges individual clinical reality with organizational analysis: bullying is not only unpleasant; it is a repeated threat to core needs under conditions of power asymmetry and therefore can produce persistent psychological and physiological consequences at the population level as well (Nielsen & Einarsen, 2012). When organizational responses involve procedural defensiveness, minimization, or retaliation, targets can deteriorate further, an effect consistent with institutional betrayal dynamics, in which harm is compounded by a trusted institution’s action or inaction (Smith & Freyd, 2014).
Organizations “Act Like Persons,” But Are Not Embodied Moral Subjects
Galtung’s (2003) deeper-layer triad closely aligns with workplace bullying. Still, modern organizational life sharpens one additional dimension that is worth naming explicitly: organizations are treated as if they are persons, capable of values, responsibility, and care, while lacking the embodied capacities that make moral relationships possible (e.g., a nervous system that registers shame, remorse, or moral pain). This “as-if personhood” is not merely a metaphor; it is also reflected in corporate law, where corporations are treated as legal persons (juridical persons) that can hold rights and duties, own property, enter contracts, and sue or be sued (Pollman, 2011).
This creates a profound asymmetry. This asymmetry is intensified by a second, quieter disconnection: many organizations reward forms of authority that operate as if the leader, too, has no body. When leaders become cut off from somatic signals (e.g., tension, fear, shame, empathy, and the internal “brake” of conscience), power is more easily expressed through control, coercion, and procedural coldness rather than through grounded presence and relational accountability. Targets, by contrast, experience bullying as a full-body event: sleep disruption, hypervigilance, collapse, shame, and the sense of social danger lodged in the nervous system. The result is an embodied mismatch; human bodies carrying the impact while disembodied systems, and often body-disconnected leaders, remain structurally buffered from consequence.
This embodied mismatch also helps explain a recurrent psychological illusion in organizational life: we relate to institutions as if they can feel. People instinctively relate to “persons” (and to institutions that present themselves as persons) as if they can feel, register moral weight, and move toward repair. Yet the organization’s operative “needs” are structural: continuity, risk control, and financial goals. When harm occurs, the system can respond in ways that preserve itself without having to metabolize the moral weight in an embodied way. In such environments, it is unsurprising that individuals who are less connected to empathy, vulnerability, and conscience can advance more easily, because their internal friction is lower within systems that reward control, coercion, and evasion of accountability (Dåderman & Ragnestål-Impola, 2019).
From an attachment-informed lens, this also intersects with developmental wounds: where early mirroring and co-regulation were insufficient, some individuals learn to substitute control for connection, dominance for safety, and image for inner worth. Gender norms can amplify this pathway by socializing emotional disconnection as strength and bodily vulnerability as weakness. The result is a cultural ecosystem in which disembodied power is both structurally protected and psychologically reproduced.
Image via Unsplash by Austin Distel @austindistel
From Surface Fixes to Deep-Layer Intervention
Galtung’s (2003) “deeper layer” makes a quiet but radical claim: lasting change does not come from managing the surface of conflict; it comes from transforming the cultural meanings, structural incentives, and basic-needs violations that perpetuate harm. Applied to workplace bullying, this reframes the central question from “Who is the difficult person?” to “What kind of system makes this harm predictable and what does it reward, excuse, and protect?”
If bullying is stabilized by deep structures (incentives, complaint architectures, protected power), deep culture (minimization norms and gendered credibility gaps), and basic-needs violations (safety, dignity, voice, and reality-validation), then solutions must operate at those same levels.
That means organizations need more than policies: they need accountable structures that constrain destructive leadership, cultures that make harm nameable without retaliation, and response pathways that prevent institutional betrayal by prioritizing protection and repair over image management.
Deep-layer intervention also requires a different relationship to power, one that can stay present with complexity without defaulting to corridor-closing and command-and-control. In practice, that includes embodied leadership: the capacity to feel one’s own reactivity, to tolerate discomfort without humiliation, and to use authority to broaden dialogue, clarify agreements, and protect dignity. Where power can be felt, it can also be repaired; where power cannot be felt, harm is more easily managed, minimized, and displaced.
Conclusion
Workplace bullying persists when the visible incidents are addressed, but the deeper layer remains intact: structures that protect power, cultures that minimize harm, and repeated violations of basic human needs. A Galtung-informed lens renders bullying legible as a systemic pattern, one sustained by what organizations reward, normalize, and defensively reclassify. The practical task is therefore not only to stop individual behaviors, but to redesign the conditions that make harm predictable and protection unreliable.
References
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