Today on the subject of solving workplace bullying I’m writing about something I’d much rather pretend wasn’t true: the inevitable bully within. The part in each of us that, under the right conditions, could do what Steph McGovern did on Celebrity Bear Hunt—take the plank, leave someone else as ‘Bear Bait’, and sleep at night because “it’s a competition and I don’t want to lose.”
The Steph McGovern Moment
Watching Steph calmly take Big Zuu’s plank of wood that he and his team mates were using to cross the swamp, and therefore stopping them race across, then shrug off the impact on him and his team landed hard for me (and him, although after an evening of ranting he did come back strong in the Bear Hunt). It wasn’t cartoon villain territory. It was ordinary. Justified. Efficient. “If I don’t take it, I lose.” It’s such a clean narrative: scarce resource, clear goal, single focus—win.
Psychology has language for this. Dorothy Suskind describes a scarcity model where if others gain status, recognition, or safety, we feel we lose it. In that mindset, you don’t see another human; you see a threat to your survival in the hierarchy. The plank isn’t wood; it’s oxygen. They lose so you can win.
I had a problem with it, others didn’t. I know it is a game, and I know the goal is to win, but to scupper another player, to take their chance of winning away, that is something else, right? Not everyone in my household agreed, and it caused some debate.
What Steph did has been bothering me because it wasn’t just about her winning; it was about taking away the possibility that the other team could win from them. It wasn’t “I’ll run faster,” it was “I’ll quietly take your running shoes so you can’t run.” That feels different in my sense of the world. Scarcity says, “There isn’t enough, so I need to secure my share.” What happened on that game felt closer to dominance and social comparison—my safety is guaranteed not by doing well, but by making sure you cannot do well. Social dominance theory would see this as protecting superior status in the hierarchy, not simply striving for the win.
In dominance, you become the target. Your options are constrained, your agency removed, your chance to win deliberately dismantled. That’s much closer to bullying dynamics, where the goal isn’t just self-protection or self preservation but controlling and limiting another’s chances…and this is where moral disengagement whispers its justifications: “It’s just strategy,” “Anyone would do the same,” “If I don’t do it, I’ll be the one left exposed”. I think the reason it lands so uncomfortably is that it shows us the line between competing to win and actively constructing a world where others never had a fair chance to race in the first place. Does this mean that bullying is not being fair then, and how does that fit into the world of work?
Scarcity, Status and the Quiet Slide into Bullying
In my research on workplace bullying, I keep coming back to social dominance theory: some people are more motivated to secure and hold a superior place in the hierarchy. When that drive meets scarcity—too few promotions, too little recognition, too much fear—it can flip from healthy ambition into something darker.
Several things start to happen:
- Scarcity story: “There’s not enough success/safety/approval to go around.”
- Zero-sum thinking: “If you win, I lose; if you rise, I fall.”
- Moral disengagement: we reframe harm so we can live with it.
Albert Bandura (from social learning theory) calls these moral disengagement strategies: “I’m just being strategic,” “They’re too sensitive,” “It’s not personal, it’s business”. None of these sound like classic bullying lines. They sound like high performers under pressure. That’s what scares me.
The research also shows that many bullies are hurt people using dominance to patch over deep insecurity. Scarcity pours petrol on that fire. When you already feel ‘not enough’, every plank becomes life-or-death.
The Animal in the Room
If this all feels uncomfortably primal, that’s because it is. Studies of 85 animal species show a few consistent dominance patterns, including a bullying pattern—concentrated aggression towards much lower-ranked, more vulnerable individuals. The “kiss up, kick down” dynamic we see in offices shows up in packs and herds: submission to those above, harsh enforcement downward.
In stable hierarchies, aggression eventually settles into maintenance-level enforcement. But when status feels threatened or resources feel scarce, things flare. Newcomers arrive, roles blur, food drops—and suddenly the claws come out. We’re not wolves, but we carry the same circuitry. When promotions, budgets or even social belonging feel at risk, that old hardware can override our modern values.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: this isn’t a “bad people” problem. It’s a human nervous system problem, running ancient dominance software in modern workplaces that actually need collaboration, not conquest.
Victim Today, Bully Tomorrow
One of the hardest findings in the research is that a meaningful proportion of people who are bullied later become bullies themselves, especially when moral disengagement kicks in. The logic is brutal but understandable: “No one protected me. This is how it works. I’m just playing the game better now.”
You can hear the scarcity in that logic:
- Safety is scarce—so I protect mine first.
- Power is scarce—so if I have it, I use it.
- Compassion is scarce—so I can’t afford to extend it.
The line between surviving a toxic system and perpetuating it is thinner than we like to admit.
So Where Is My Plank-Taking Edge?
The question this Bear Hunt moment leaves me with is not “Is Steph a bully?” (I love to win and am very competitive too, and have even done similar things on family board game night*) but “Where is my plank-taking edge boundary?” Under enough stress, competition, exhaustion, fear—where do I quietly move from assertive to aggressive, from boundaried to punitive, from driven to dehumanising?
(*Example, I once cheated playing the card game ‘Cheat’. Apparently you are not allowed to cheat at Cheat. I also played Really Nasty Horse Racing Game – clue in the title – and caused my daughters horse to fall at a fence leading to my horses victory…apparently you can’t do that to your loved ones)
Some questions I’m sitting with, and offer to you:
- When do I tell myself “it’s just how the game is played” to avoid feeling the cost to someone else?
- Where do I use scarcity language—“I can’t afford to…”, “There’s no room for…”—to justify behaviour that, on a calm day, I wouldn’t be proud of?
- Who feels like “bait” in the systems I’m part of, and what’s my relationship to that?
If bullying is, at its core, dominance plus scarcity plus moral disengagement, then the work isn’t only “spot the bully out there.” It’s notice the micro-moments in here: the email I sharpen a little too much, the opportunity I withhold, the colleague I throw to the metaphorical bear because “we need a win.”
Choosing Abundance in a Scarcity-Shaped Brain
Our evolutionary hardware isn’t going away. Our brains will always scan for threat, protect status, and overreact to scarcity. The work, I think, is to build enough awareness and community that we can feel the surge—and still choose differently.
That might look like:
- Naming out loud when competition is pushing us into “someone has to be the bait” thinking.
- Designing systems that don’t make everything zero-sum—shared wins, shared recognition, shared safety.
- Building our own capacity to sit with discomfort instead of outsourcing it to the most vulnerable person in the room.
Because if we are all one step away from scarcity-based bullying, we are also one step away from something else: noticing, pausing, and saying, “Today, I’m not taking the plank, there are plenty of planks to go around, I can win by being the best!”
I’m curious: when you think about your own history—especially under pressure—where do you see your bully within? And what helps you bring them back from the edge?
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