The Function of Dysfunction: How Workplace Bullying Sustains Itself
Introduction
Workplace bullying is often understood through the behavior of the person who bullies and the experience of the person who is being bullied. We ask what drives the behavior, why someone stays in a harmful situation, or why a person being mistreated does not simply speak up or leave. These questions can matter, but they can also leave something essential out of the picture: the relationship and the wider system in which the behavior is taking place.
When behavior develops within a relationship of unequal power, the responses of the less powerful person cannot be understood separately from the environment in which they developed. A person may become quieter, more accommodating, more vigilant, or increasingly careful about what they say because these responses help them manage a situation they cannot control.
Over time, those same responses can become part of the way the relationship functions. What began as a survival response can become something the dysfunctional relationship comes to rely on, whether through appeasement, silence, peacekeeping, accommodation, or the willingness to absorb more and more of the consequences. As these responses become familiar, they can begin to obscure the dysfunction that made them necessary in the first place. The person subjected to the dysfunction becomes increasingly visible as the problem, while the behavior they respond to fades into the background.
This is one reason workplace bullying can become so difficult to recognize and interrupt. The behavior that is easiest to see may eventually become the behavior of the person being affected, while the conditions that produced it become less visible. Looking at the function of dysfunction lets us ask a different question: What does a person’s coping mechanism do within the relationship, and how can it become part of the way the wider system operates?
Family systems thinking provides a useful starting point for understanding this process. It helps us see how one person can come to carry the effects of dysfunction within a relationship, while the underlying problem remains within the wider system.
How Adaptation Becomes Part of a Relational System
When we encounter troubling behavior, we often want to understand what it means. We ask why someone behaves a certain way, what wound might lie beneath it, or what the behavior reveals about their internal experience. These questions matter. They can help us understand a person’s history and respond with greater compassion. Within a relational system, however, another question becomes important. What does this behavior do within the relationship or relational system in which it is embedded?
Family therapy has long worked with the idea that a symptom or adaptation can have a function within a relational system. A function can be stabilizing without being healthy. In this context, “positive function” does not mean that the symptom is good. It means that the symptom helps preserve some form of stability or equilibrium within an existing system, even when that system is profoundly dysfunctional.
Consider a couple whose conflict has become difficult to address directly. The tension between the adults remains, but they have few ways to work through it together. A child may become highly attentive to the emotional atmosphere at home and begin trying to keep the peace. The child may comfort one parent when the other is upset, reassure both, avoid subjects that could trigger conflict, or step in when an argument begins to escalate.
The child may also begin to carry communication between the adults. One parent may tell the child what they want the other parent to know, or ask the child to speak to the other parent for them. The child may find themselves explaining one parent to the other, or trying to help them understand each other. In this way, the child gradually becomes an intermediary between the adults and may even begin to take on a role that belongs within the adult relationship.
The child is responding to the relational environment around them. They try to create some safety, predictability, and connection in a situation they cannot control. At the same time, their involvement can change how the adults relate to each other. When the child carries messages, translates feelings, calms conflict, or helps one parent approach the other, the adults may experience temporary relief. They no longer have to navigate the tension as directly.
Over time, a response that initially developed as a coping strategy can become woven into the relational pattern. The child adapts to the environment, and the environment begins to organize itself around that adaptation. The child becomes increasingly attentive to the adults’ emotional needs, while the adults may come to rely on the child’s ability to mediate, soothe, explain, or restore connection. What began as an attempt to create safety can become part of the way the family manages conflict and maintains its existing relationships.
In this case, the child’s adaptation serves an important function for the adults. It allows them to avoid addressing their conflict directly, postpone difficult changes in their relationship, and place responsibility for restoring peace on the child. The child is carrying something that belongs within the adult relationship, and the family can remain organized around the child’s ability to absorb and manage the tension. The family can remain organized around the child’s adaptation rather than the adults developing the capacity to face their own conflict, learn new ways of relating, or seek the support they need to change the relationship.
From Family to Workplace
Family systems thinking offers a useful lens for examining workplace bullying because it shifts attention from an individual’s behavior to the relational pattern in which that behavior develops and takes on meaning.
In a family, for example, a child may become the peacemaker, carrying messages between parents, trying to prevent conflict, or helping each parent understand the other. What begins as a way of managing an unstable environment can become part of the family’s relational pattern, allowing the adults to avoid addressing their own conflict.
A similar systemic lens can be applied to workplace bullying. Workplace bullying describes persistent, long-term negative behavior that causes psychological distress within a relationship marked by a power imbalance, where the targeted person has difficulty defending themselves. It can include repeated criticism, humiliation, exclusion, intimidation, withholding information or resources, social isolation, sabotage, and other behaviors that undermine a person’s ability to participate and protect themselves. The persistent and escalating nature of the behavior is significant because repeated exposure to bullying can place the targeted person in an ongoing state of having to protect themselves while their ability to respond is constrained by the power relationship.
That difficulty defending oneself is closely connected to dependency. In a family, a child depends on their parents for care, safety, protection, and belonging and therefore has limited freedom to challenge how the relationship functions. In the workplace, dependency takes a different form. An employee depends on their job for income, professional future, status, and the ability to support themselves and others.
This dependency becomes particularly important when conflict develops between an employee and a supervisor. The relationship is not equal. The supervisor holds authority within the organization and can influence the employee’s working conditions, performance evaluations, opportunities, reputation, and, depending on their position, continued employment. As a result, a conflict that might otherwise be worked through between two people carries consequences for the person with less power. The employee has to consider what could happen if they disagree, set a boundary, question a decision, or challenge the supervisor’s behavior. Their financial security, professional future, status and belonging, and ability to support themselves and others are connected to a relationship in which the other person holds greater power.
In such an environment, the employee faces the complex task of responding professionally while also responding to a situation that can trigger powerful survival responses. When someone is threatened, humiliated, intimidated, or repeatedly undermined by someone with greater power, the impulse may be to fight back, defend oneself, withdraw, or appease. At the same time, the employee is expected to remain composed, communicate appropriately, and continue to function within the professional role. Thus, the employee must manage different demands at once: responding to the immediate threat while remaining professionally engaged with the person creating it.
Over time, the person learns what happens when they respond in different ways. Speaking up may lead to further hostility. Setting a boundary may bring criticism or retaliation. Showing anger may be used against them. Remaining quiet may reduce the immediate tension. Agreeing may bring temporary relief. Trying harder may seem to prevent criticism, at least for a while. The person’s responses are therefore shaped by the consequences they experience within the relationship.
This is where the systemic dimension of workplace bullying becomes particularly important. The employee is adapting within a relationship of unequal power with their supervisor. The supervisor’s behavior can itself serve a function within the relational system. Bullying can establish hierarchy, punish dissent, enforce conformity, protect status, prevent challenge, or signal to others what happens when someone resists. At the same time, the behavior activates the targeted person’s survival responses. Appeasement, silence, vigilance, or over-compliance can reduce the immediate threat while also making it easier for the supervisor to continue exerting power in the same way. Over time, the adaptations that help the employee manage the situation can become part of the relational pattern through which the bullying is maintained.
The sequence can become circular. The supervisor exerts pressure, the employee adapts in order to reduce the threat, the immediate tension decreases, and the supervisor has less reason to change the behavior. The employee’s response therefore becomes part of an equilibrium that protects the relationship from having to change.
Once this pattern has developed, the relationship can begin to function in a way that requires less direct confrontation. The supervisor exerts pressure, the employee becomes increasingly careful in responding, and the immediate conflict may become less visible. The absence of open resistance can make it seem like the situation has settled, even though the underlying power relationship has not changed.
When the Adaptation Becomes Part of the Pattern
This can be one reason workplace bullying persists for long periods. The employee may do everything possible to reduce conflict and remain functional at work, while the supervisor sees the employee as increasingly manageable. The employee may become more accommodating, more cautious, or more reluctant to raise concerns, and the supervisor may therefore encounter fewer challenges to their behavior.
The pattern can become particularly entrenched when the employee’s adaptation begins to meet the expectations of the surrounding workplace. If the employee becomes quiet, others may interpret it as a preference for avoiding conflict. If they take on additional work without objecting, others may gradually regard it as their normal level of performance. If they stop questioning decisions, others may mistake their silence for agreement. In this way, the employee’s adaptation can gradually become part of how other people understand the employee and the relationship with the supervisor.
Silence can become particularly important within this process, although silence itself does not have a single meaning. An employee may become quieter because they have learned that speaking openly leads to criticism, retaliation, humiliation, or further hostility. They may stop raising concerns because previous attempts have brought negative consequences. In other cases, the person may become quieter because they are exhausted, increasingly preoccupied with managing the situation, or depleted by the effort of remaining functional within an unsafe relationship. Prolonged stress can affect concentration, confidence, energy, and health, leaving the person with fewer resources to explain, challenge, or defend themselves.
From the outside, these different forms of silence can look similar. The employee may appear withdrawn, less communicative, disengaged, or unwilling to participate, while the circumstances that contributed to the change remain less visible. The quieter the employee becomes, the less visible the conflict can appear. The workplace may experience fewer objections, fewer difficult conversations, and fewer open signs of disagreement, even though the underlying relationship has not changed. What appears to be calm or cooperation may therefore reflect adaptation, coercion, exhaustion, or the gradual loss of confidence that can develop when a person repeatedly experiences that speaking openly feels unsafe.
Once these responses have become familiar, the workplace can begin to relate to the employee through them. The employee who has become quiet may now be known as someone who does not speak up. The person who has become cautious may be seen as lacking confidence. Someone who has learned to accommodate may simply be regarded as cooperative. The circumstances that gave rise to these responses can gradually recede, while the responses themselves become part of the employee’s perceived character and professional identity.
The result can be a gradual shift in attention from the supervisor’s behavior to the employee’s reactions. The employee becomes the person who needs to change, communicate differently, become more resilient, or manage the relationship more effectively. The person with greater power can remain relatively unchanged while the person with less power is expected to adapt further. What began as a response to the bullying can then become evidence used to explain why the employee is supposedly the problem.
When the System Adjusts Around the Adaptation
The shift in attention from the supervisor’s behavior to the employee’s reactions can then shape how the wider workplace responds. The employee’s distress may be visible in ways the supervisor’s behavior is not. The employee may become tearful, anxious, withdrawn, defensive, or less confident, while the supervisor may appear calm, composed, and professional in formal settings.
The person most visibly affected can therefore become the one who receives the most attention. An employee may be asked why they are struggling, why they have become less cooperative, or why their performance has changed. These questions can be appropriate when they are part of a genuine effort to understand what is happening, but they become problematic when they are asked without examining the relationship in which the changes have developed.
Attention may turn toward the employee’s communication, emotional responses, performance, or ability to cope with pressure. The employee may be encouraged to become more assertive, manage their emotions, communicate more effectively, or develop greater resilience. The supervisor’s behavior can become less central to the discussion, even though it is shaping the employee’s responses and maintaining the conditions in which they develop.
The employee can then find themselves carrying responsibility for making the relationship work. They may try harder to communicate appropriately, become more careful about how they express disagreement, or take greater responsibility for preventing conflict. The more they adapt, the easier it can become to overlook the unequal relationship that made the adaptation necessary. Their response can gradually be treated as part of the problem rather than understood as a response to what is happening.
Over time, the pressure can accumulate even when the employee has worked hard to remain composed and professional. A person who has repeatedly contained their anger, fear, or distress may eventually react more visibly. Anger, tears, withdrawal, defensiveness, or a forceful response can then appear to others as evidence that the employee is the problem. The reaction is visible, while the repeated behavior that preceded it can become less visible. What looks like an isolated outburst can be the culmination of a much longer sequence in which the employee has been adapting to escalating abuse.
This can also affect how the employee understands their own experience. When a person is repeatedly told, directly or indirectly, that they are too sensitive, too emotional, too difficult, or unable to handle pressure, they may begin to question their own perception of what is happening. Their reactions to the abuse can gradually become evidence that they are the problem, while the behavior that produced those reactions becomes less visible.
The surrounding workplace can also begin to adjust around what has become familiar. Colleagues may learn that the employee is unlikely to challenge the supervisor openly. They may become accustomed to the employee taking on additional work, remaining quiet in meetings, or avoiding particular subjects. Managers may come to expect the employee to continue accommodating the situation.
The workplace can therefore begin to function around the adaptation without anyone explicitly deciding that this should happen. The employee has adjusted to the supervisor’s behavior, and others have adjusted to the employee’s response. What began as a way of managing an unsafe relationship can gradually become part of the normal way the workplace operates.
This can keep the underlying conflict unaddressed. The supervisor continues to exercise power in the same way, while the employee becomes increasingly responsible for managing the consequences. The organization may experience less visible conflict because the employee has learned to contain their responses, while the underlying relationship remains unchanged. The stability of the workplace can therefore depend, at least in part, on the continued adaptation of the person with less positional power. They accommodate, absorb tension, and manage the consequences of the more powerful person’s behavior. When one person carries the tension this way, others can remain relatively undisturbed. The system experiences a form of stability because the conflict has been absorbed somewhere rather than addressed.
Notably, if that employee leaves, the underlying pattern does not necessarily leave with them. Another employee may enter the same position and encounter the same expectations, the same exercise of power, and the same pressure to adapt. The particular person may change while the relational pattern remains.
This can make it tempting to see each situation as an individual problem involving a particular employee and supervisor. A systemic perspective also asks what happens when the same position repeatedly produces similar dynamics. If different employees become quiet, accommodating, anxious, or depleted in their relationship with the same person, the pattern cannot be understood through the characteristics of each individual employee alone. The repetition itself becomes information about the system.
When Conflict Avoidance Protects the Pattern
Silence within the workplace can also reflect a wider difficulty with conflict. Some organizations have little capacity for direct disagreement, difficult conversations, or the discomfort that comes with challenging someone who holds authority. People may learn to preserve relationships by accommodating the person who is most difficult to confront. The immediate discomfort of addressing the problem can then outweigh the discomfort of letting it continue.
This becomes particularly important when the person with greater power has little capacity to tolerate disagreement or criticism. Rather than developing the capacity to engage with conflict, they may rely on others to accommodate them. Colleagues may learn to choose their words carefully, avoid difficult subjects, or remain silent when they see something that concerns them. The organization can gradually become organized around preventing conflict with the person who holds power, while the person with less power becomes increasingly responsible for managing the relationship.
The same process can occur when bystanders remain silent. Their silence may protect them from becoming the next target, but it also allows the workplace to maintain the appearance that nothing serious is happening. The absence of open disagreement can then be mistaken for the absence of a problem.
Ultimately, the power dynamic in the work-relationship must be challenged for the pattern to change. Yet the person with the least power often has the most to lose by doing so. The employee depends on the workplace for income, professional continuity, status, belonging, and the ability to support themselves and others. Challenging a supervisor therefore carries consequences that are different from those faced by the person whose authority is being challenged.
This is also where gender can shape the pattern. Expectations about how people should behave when they challenge authority are not the same for everyone. A man who speaks directly, expresses anger, or refuses to accommodate may be perceived as assertive or strong, while a woman displaying similar behavior can be described as difficult, emotional, aggressive, or lacking in collegiality. A woman who has learned to maintain relationships by accommodating others may therefore find herself carrying a particularly difficult burden. She may be expected to preserve the relationship while also being responsible for addressing behavior that others are unwilling to confront.
These expectations can shape who is expected to accommodate, who is permitted to express conflict, and how a person’s behavior is interpreted when they do challenge authority. A woman who has remained quiet may be regarded as cooperative, while a woman who eventually objects may be regarded as difficult because she has stepped outside the role others have come to expect from her. The same dynamic can be shaped by racial and cultural expectations. A Black employee challenging a white supervisor does not enter the interaction free from the social meanings that have historically been attached to race, authority, professionalism, anger, and respect. The employee’s gender, race, cultural background, and social position can therefore shape how others perceive their behavior and what they consider acceptable in the relationship.
This means the ability to challenge power is shaped not only by individual courage or assertiveness, but also by the expectations attached to the speaker and the power held by the person being challenged. When a person has less institutional, social, or cultural power, speaking openly can carry consequences that are not shared equally across the organization. Telling the employee to become more assertive can therefore place another burden on someone already carrying less power, while leaving the conditions that make speaking up difficult unchanged.
For a workplace to change, responsibility must extend to those with greater power and the authority to intervene. Leaders have to be willing to tolerate the discomfort that comes with confronting harmful behavior. Colleagues must be willing to recognize when their own conflict avoidance helps the existing pattern continue. The organization must be able to withstand the disruption that occurs when something kept quiet is finally brought into the open.
The person who finally speaks up can therefore be experienced as the source of disruption. Their refusal to remain quiet makes the conflict visible. Their boundary interrupts an established pattern. Their complaint requires other people to take a position. The person who breaks the silence can become more visible than the behavior that made the silence necessary.
This becomes especially clear when the employee stops appeasing. If the supervisor responds with greater hostility when the employee sets a boundary, the escalation can make it appear that the boundary caused the conflict. In reality, the boundary has exposed how much the previous stability depended on the employee continuing to absorb the tension.
Yet the disruption may be the first indication that the previous arrangement was being maintained through the employee’s adaptation. What appears to disturb the stability of the workplace can reveal how much that stability depended on one person continuing to absorb the consequences of the relationship.
When the Dysfunction Becomes Located in One Person
There are situations in which the employee comes to carry more than the immediate consequences of bullying. They can become the person in whom the organization locates the problem itself.
A workplace can contain contradictions that are difficult to acknowledge. An organization may speak about psychological safety while rewarding conformity. It may value collaboration while operating through competition. It may encourage autonomy while demanding unquestioning compliance. It may present itself as ethical while tolerating behavior that violates its stated values.
When these contradictions become difficult to hold, locating the problem in one employee can provide temporary relief. The employee becomes “too emotional,” “difficult,” “not a team player,” “disloyal,” or “unable to cope.” The organization can then experience greater coherence because it has located the contradiction in the person rather than examining it within the system.
The employee can become the place where the organization’s unresolved tension is expressed and contained. This does not mean that the employee consciously takes on that role. It can develop through repeated interactions in which their objections, distress, or refusal to accommodate become treated as evidence that they are the problem.
This is one reason why facts alone do not always interrupt workplace bullying. The targeted person may be challenging an equilibrium that lets others avoid confronting what is happening. Their account can therefore feel threatening to the system even when it is accurate.
What the Adaptation Can Cost the Employee
The adaptations that help the employee remain functional within the workplace can gradually affect other areas of their professional and personal life. Constant vigilance can make it difficult to relax. Perfectionism can make ordinary mistakes feel threatening. Appeasement can make it difficult to recognize and express one’s own needs. Withdrawal can reduce opportunities to connect with colleagues and leave the employee increasingly isolated.
The person may also begin to organize their behavior around avoiding the supervisor rather than engaging fully in their work. They may hesitate before speaking in meetings, repeatedly reconsider ordinary decisions, or spend considerable time preparing for interactions that previously required little thought.
Over time, the employee may become increasingly disconnected from their own sense of what is reasonable. They may spend more time anticipating the supervisor’s reactions than attending to their own experience. They may become uncertain about whether a request is genuinely part of their professional role or whether they are responding to pressure because refusing feels unsafe. The longer this continues, the more difficult it can become to see where professional responsibility ends and adaptation to the supervisor begins.
Understanding this can be important for recovery because the person may have spent a long time trying to correct what they believe is wrong with themselves.
From Adaptation to Greater Freedom
For the employee, recognizing the pattern can change the meaning of their own experience. They may begin to understand why they became so vigilant, why they tried so hard to avoid conflict, or why they found it difficult to challenge the supervisor even when they knew that something was wrong. They may also begin to distinguish between their professional identity and the role they came to occupy within the relationship. They may have been the person who stayed calm, took on more work, apologized first, avoided difficult conversations, or tried to keep the supervisor satisfied. These responses may have become so familiar that they began to feel like part of who they were.
Seeing these responses in the context of the relationship can help the person recognize that they developed while navigating greater power and the consequences of challenging it. This can make room for greater self-compassion without denying how those adaptations may now be limiting.
Recovery does not require the person to reject every response that developed during the period of bullying. Some responses may still provide useful information. Vigilance, for example, can help a person notice when something feels unsafe. The task is to regain the freedom to decide how to respond rather than having the response determined entirely by the expectation of threat.
This can involve becoming more aware of what happens in the body during interactions with authority. A person may notice tension, urgency, the impulse to agree immediately, or the desire to withdraw before consciously deciding what they want to say. Over time, this awareness can create more space between an old response and the action that follows. The person may become more able to pause, remain connected to themselves, and decide what is appropriate in the present situation.
This is part of restoring agency. The goal is to regain the capacity to remain connected to oneself while being in relationship with others, including people who hold authority.
At the same time, recovery cannot be reduced to changing the employee’s response. If the person returns to an unchanged relational environment, the conditions that shaped the survival response can reactivate it. Regulation, self-trust, boundaries, and inner support can strengthen the person’s capacity to respond differently, but they do not remove the organization’s responsibility to address the conditions that created the need for those responses.
Image via Unsplash by Vitaly Gariev@silverkblack
A Wider Understanding of Dysfunction
Looking at workplace bullying through this lens changes the question we ask about dysfunction. We can still be interested in the individual, their history, their vulnerabilities, and their responses. At the same time, we can ask what is happening between people and what the surrounding system has organized itself around.
The employee’s adaptation can tell us something about the relationship in which it developed. The supervisor’s behavior can tell us something about how power is being used. The organization’s response can tell us something about what it is willing to see, address, or leave unchanged.
These different levels are connected, and the distribution of power within them helps determine who is expected to adapt, who can remain unchanged, and who is expected to address the conflict.
The employee may be trying to preserve their livelihood and professional future. The supervisor may be maintaining their authority. Colleagues may be protecting their own position. The organization may be avoiding conflict or disruption. None of these motivations needs to be fully conscious for the pattern to persist.
The person subjected to the dysfunction can therefore end up carrying much of what the system has not addressed. Their survival response may absorb tension that belongs within the relationship. Their silence may reduce visible conflict. Their appeasement may protect others from having to confront the person with greater power. Their withdrawal may make the workplace appear quieter. Their distress may eventually become evidence that they are the problem.
This is what makes systemic dysfunction so difficult to recognize. The pattern can be maintained through many small adaptations by different people, while the greatest burden remains with the person who has the least power.
Understanding the function of dysfunction therefore allows us to see more than the behavior itself. It helps us understand how a person’s response developed, what it protects against, what it does within the relationship, what the wider system can avoid because the person is carrying the symptom, and how the workplace responds to it.
Responsibility, however, remains with the person who chooses to use their power in a harmful way and with the organization when it has the authority and responsibility to address that behavior. The employee can work on their own responses, boundaries, and recovery without taking responsibility for the conditions that made those responses necessary.
This distinction allows us to understand the employee’s adaptation without turning it into another reason to hold the employee responsible. The employee adapted to the environment. They did not create the environment. The adaptation may have become part of the way the bullying continued, but that does not make the employee responsible for the bullying.
When this distinction becomes clear, people can begin to see the person differently. Their silence can be understood in relation to what they feared would happen if they spoke. Their appeasement can be understood in relation to the power they were facing. Their vigilance can be understood in relation to the unpredictability they had experienced. Their perfectionism can be understood in relation to the criticism they were trying to prevent. The person is no longer reduced to the behavior that developed under pressure.
The wider system also comes into view. The question becomes not only what the employee needs to change, but what the supervisor, the organization, and the surrounding workplace need to take responsibility for. This shift matters because a workplace can remain stable by asking one person to adapt more and more closely to conditions that should instead be addressed.
A healthier system lets people address conflict directly. It lets people disagree without fear of retaliation, set boundaries without losing belonging, and receive feedback without humiliation or intimidation. It does not require one person to carry the emotional and relational burden of maintaining peace for everyone else.
When that becomes possible, the person no longer has to organize themselves around surviving the relationship. They can begin to return to themselves, to their own perception, and to the possibility of relating to others without having to abandon their own dignity in order to remain safe.
About the Author
Dr. Kerstin Hecker, PhD, is a workplace bullying researcher, depth psychologist, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, and holistic counselor. Her work focuses on workplace bullying, covert aggression, abuse of power, relational harm, organizational dynamics, and the effects of chronic stress. She offers online counseling in English and German.
© 2026 Dr. Kerstin Hecker. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced, distributed, or used in any form without prior written permission from the author, except for brief quotations with proper citation.
