When Power Cannot Feel: Managing Risk Over Care in Workplace Bullying

Imagine entering work each day knowing that the entity holding the greatest power over your life has no body, no nervous system, and no capacity for pain, yet it shapes your daily reality, your safety, and your well-being. Decisions made by organizations ripple through human bodies, families, communities, and democratic institutions, even though the organizational entity itself can neither feel fear nor register harm. For depth psychology and somatic psychology, this is not a metaphorical problem but a lived one. It is a collision between power that is not embodied, power that does not register fear, shame, or pain, and embodied nervous systems whose agency is real but often constrained by hierarchy, dependency, and institutional process.

The Institutional Performance of Values​

Modern organizations often speak the language of values, well-being, and psychological safety. Mission statements promise respect. Codes of conduct affirm dignity. Training modules assure employees that harm will not be tolerated. Yet, alongside this carefully curated ethical surface, a different reality persists. Workplace bullying remains widespread, underreported, and frequently mishandled, leaving individuals psychologically injured and somatically burdened. This paradox is not accidental. It reflects a structural mismatch between human beings, who are embodied nervous systems with conscience and vulnerability, and organizations, which are legally treated as “persons[1]” yet lack bodies, nervous systems, or moral interiority in the human sense.

Taken together, the curated ethical surface and the legal fiction of personhood create a double bind: the organization can present itself as a moral actor while responding as a risk-managing system.

Legal Personhood, Moral Expectations

Seen this way, the asymmetry becomes unmistakable. When organizations are recognized as “persons,” but are not embodied moral subjects, this creates a psychological trap. Humans instinctively relate to “persons” as if they were capable of conscience, remorse, and relational repair. Organizations possess none of these capacities. They have no nervous system to register fear or shame, no capacity for moral pain, and no developmental trajectory toward maturity. What they do possess are incentive structures, legal architectures, and reputational strategies designed to ensure continuity and risk control. When harm occurs, the question quietly shifts from “What happened to this person?” to “What does this mean for organizational risk?”

Workplace bullying is often framed as an interpersonal conflict, a failure of communication, or a matter of individual pathology. Such framings obscure its deeper nature. Empirical research over the last decade has repeatedly shown that bullying is best understood as a systemic phenomenon rooted in power asymmetries, institutional cultures, and organizational responses rather than in the personalities of targets or perpetrators alone (Einarsen et al., 2020). When organizations fail to recognize this, they inadvertently shift the cost of institutional dysfunction onto the bodies and psyches of individuals.

The Nervous System Remembers

From a depth psychological and somatic perspective, this cost is not abstract. It is carried in altered nervous system regulation, disrupted sleep, chronic hypervigilance, and a persistent erosion of trust. Longitudinal studies demonstrate that exposure to workplace bullying predicts anxiety disorders, depressive symptoms, and posttraumatic stress symptoms years after the exposure has ended, even when individuals have left the organization entirely (Nielsen & Einarsen, 2018). The nervous system does not reset simply because an employment contract ends. It remembers how power was exercised, how danger was signaled, and how appeals for protection were received or dismissed.

This somatic imprint becomes particularly severe when individuals seek help through formal organizational channels. Contrary to common assumptions, reporting does not reliably mitigate harm. On the contrary, research has shown that targets who encounter procedural defensiveness, minimization, or subtle retaliation after reporting often experience more severe psychological deterioration than those who remain silent (D’Cruz et al., 2021). The organizational promise of care, when not fulfilled, becomes a source of secondary injury. Scholars describe this phenomenon as institutional betrayal, a term originally developed in trauma research to describe harm exacerbated by trusted systems failing to respond adequately to abuse (Smith & Freyd, 2014).

Risk Logic and Reframing

To understand why this pattern is so persistent, one must examine the structural logic of contemporary organizations. Over the past two decades, organizational life has been increasingly shaped by financialization, compliance regimes, and risk management frameworks that prioritize legal exposure and reputational control over relational accountability (Davis, 2017). In many publicly traded firms, this liability-and-reputation framing aligns with a profit-maximization logic that has been influentially defended in shareholder-centered accounts of corporate purpose (Friedman, 1970). Within such systems, harm is not primarily evaluated in human terms but in terms of liability. The question becomes not “What has happened to this person?” but “What is the organizational risk?” This subtle shift has profound consequences.

In this context, bullying may be denied outright (‘this doesn’t happen here’) or, if acknowledged, reframed into safer categories like ‘conflict,’ ‘miscommunication,’ or ‘performance.’ Language becomes technical. Emotions are pathologized. Events are fragmented into isolated incidents stripped of pattern and meaning.

Compliance processes create the appearance of responsiveness while effectively neutralizing moral urgency. Edelman and Talesh (2011) described this as the legalization of organizational ethics, where procedures substitute for responsibility. Employees are invited to speak, but only in ways that fit predefined categories and timelines. What does not fit is rendered irrelevant.

The Somatic Ledger

The body, however, does not operate according to a logic of compliance. It registers a threat directly. Meta-analytic research has demonstrated associations between workplace bullying and cardiovascular disease, immune dysregulation, and chronic pain syndromes (Lever et al., 2019). These findings challenge the enduring organizational myth that bullying is a “soft issue.” The data tell a different story. What organizations externalize as interpersonal friction is internalized by individuals as physiological stress, with long-term health consequences.

The landscape of work has further intensified these dynamics. Remote and hybrid work arrangements, algorithmic performance monitoring, and AI-mediated management have reduced informal relational buffers while increasing opacity. The modern workplace has changed faster than our moral frameworks. Digitally mediated control systems increase surveillance while decreasing relational accountability.

Opacity and Psychological Safety

Recent studies indicate that bullying in virtual environments often becomes more individualized, less visible, and harder to substantiate, leaving targets isolated with their experience and more likely to doubt their own perceptions (Keashly et al., 2023). The absence of witnesses does not reduce harm. It amplifies it.

At the same time, organizations increasingly adopt the language of psychological safety. While this concept has empirical grounding and potential value, its institutionalization often turns it into rhetoric rather than practice. When power differentials remain unaddressed, calls for openness can paradoxically increase vulnerability. Speaking up becomes risky when those who hold power remain insulated from consequence. Research on procedural justice consistently shows that perceived fairness depends less on outcomes than on whether people believe that rules apply equally and that authority is constrained by ethics (Tyler, 2017). When this belief erodes, trust collapses.

Civic Lessons and Moral Injury

This collapse has implications beyond individual well-being. Organizational cultures that normalize bullying, denial, or cost-shifting quietly undermine democratic sensibilities. Zuboff’s (2019) analysis of surveillance capitalism highlights how contemporary institutions increasingly shape behavior without reciprocal accountability. In such environments, individuals learn that power does not have to listen, feel, or repair. The lesson is embodied long before it is articulated cognitively. When power can act without feeling, the lesson absorbed is not merely organizational. It is civic and moral.

From a clinical perspective, what many targets describe is not merely stress but moral injury. Originally conceptualized in military psychology, moral injury refers to the lasting psychological harm that arises when individuals are forced to participate in, witness, or endure violations of their moral expectations by authority figures or institutions (Shay, 2014). In organizational settings, this occurs when individuals continue to bring integrity, loyalty, and good faith to systems that are structurally incapable of reciprocating them. The injury lies not only in what is done but in what is revealed. That one’s dignity is negotiable. That harm can be proceduralized. That power can remain untouched.

Image via Unsplash by Adrian Siaril @adriansiaril

Limits, Dignity, and the Human Organism

What, then, does it mean to be a human being? An embodied nervous system, a conscience, a psyche. Inside an organization that is legally treated as a “person,” yet has no body, no nervous system, and no inner life in the human sense? Organizations can simulate ethics, but they cannot feel. They do not experience fear, shame, or remorse in their bodies. They do not carry memory in tissue or regulation in breath. When harm occurs, it is always someone else’s body that bears the cost.

This recognition invites a different conversation. Not about resilience, but about limits. Not about coping, but about containment of power. It raises questions that cannot be resolved through policy alone. How much moral burden can be shifted onto individuals before institutions themselves become injurious? What does accountability look like when systems cannot feel the consequences of their actions? And what would organizational life require if dignity were treated not as a value statement, but as a boundary?

These are not abstract questions. They live in nervous systems. They surface in therapy rooms. They shape whether people withdraw, speak, somatize, or break. They also shape the ethical future of work itself.

Have you thought about it? What does it mean to bring your whole human organism into a system that cannot feel you? And what happens to trust, to moral understanding, and to the human capacity for engagement, when power remains structurally numb?

References

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