When Bullying Becomes a Curve, Not a Category
In my last post about “the bully within,” I shared how a moment on Celebrity Bear Hunt—Steph McGovern taking Big Zuu’s plank—sent me down a rabbit hole about scarcity, competition and the quiet ways we can all slide away from our ‘better nature’.
A comment on that post has stayed with me. @EdwardNelson wrote:
“Rather someone being a ‘bully’, we might also look at it as a role that shifts and represents those elements that undo our ‘better nature’ – what is scarce? where is the power?”
That line unlocked something important for me: what if bullying isn’t a fixed identity, but a shifting role on a curve, pulled around by context, history and the system we’re in?
From “Is Someone a Bully?” to “Where Are We on the Curve Today?”
In psychology, we’re used to thinking in bell curves. Most people, most of the time, sit somewhere in the middle—average, imperfect, trying our best. At the extremes, we find rare cases: people who are consistently and severely abusive, and people who are almost impossibly compassionate and self‑regulated.
So, the hunch is that bullying can be understood in a similar way. Not as a binary—bully vs. not bully—but as a behavioural distribution:
- On the left side: heightened sensitivity, fragility, hurt. We feel easily threatened, raw, exposed.
- In the middle: everyday relational friction, misjudgements, clumsy comments that can be repaired.
- On the right side: aggression, domination, “I win because you lose” behaviour—what we would recognise as bullying when it becomes patterned, repeated and harmful.[1]
Most of us move along this curve over time. A bad night’s sleep nudges us right. Feeling deeply valued nudges us left. A run of success or recognition pulls us into the calmer centre. In that sense, “the bully” isn’t just a person; it’s a position we can occupy on the curve when enough conditions line up.
The Second Curve: Context, Crisis and the System
But here’s where it gets more interesting. What if there isn’t just one curve—but two.
Alongside our individual behaviour curve, there’s also a situational/contextual curve that describes how pressured, scarce or threatening the environment feels:
- Low pressure: psychological safety is high, resources feel adequate, roles are clear.
- Moderate pressure: some change, some competition, some ambiguity.
- High pressure: restructures, layoffs, budget cuts, mergers, leadership churn, chronic overload.
The research on workplace bullying is clear: bullying behaviours spike in high‑stress, high‑competition, resource‑scarce environments, especially when leadership tolerates or even rewards aggression that “gets results”.
Now imagine those two curves interacting:
- You are already a bit to the “right” (tired, stressed, feeling unappreciated).
- The context is also to the “right” (major restructure, jobs at risk, targets rising, resources falling, lack of clarity).
Where those two right‑shifts overlap, the risk of bullying behaviour—especially scarcity‑ and dominance‑driven bullying—goes up sharply. It’s not that “you are a bully” as a fixed identity. It’s that you and the context have aligned in a way that pulls you away from your ‘better nature‘ – as my buddy @EdwardNelson puts it.
Behaviours That Move, Not Monsters That Live Inside Us
This is where that comment about bullying as a role rather than a personality is so powerful.
In a system with scarce resources, unclear power and high stakes:
- Someone unconsciously takes on the role of enforcer (pushing others, using fear).
- Someone else becomes the target (especially high performers who threaten others’ status ).
- Others slip into bystander or ally roles, shifting depending on their own fear, security and values.
The same individual can move between these roles over a year, or a career. One of the more confronting findings from the research is that a significant minority of people who have been bullied go on to bully others, particularly when moral disengagement kicks in. “No one protected me; this is just how it works” becomes a story that justifies shifting right on the curve.
So instead of asking “Is X a bully?”, we might ask:
- Where is this person on their behaviour curve right now?
- Where is the organisation on its context curve?
- How are history, culture and power combining to pull them away from their better nature?
- What actions or ‘interventions’ might help us to bring the people and the business back to their better nature?
That doesn’t excuse harm. It locates it—in a system that can be changed, rather than a monster inside someone that can’t be tamed.
When Curves Align: Restructures, Risk and the Perfect Storm
It’s hard to overstate how much contextual change impacts individuals. In those periods or restructure or downsizing almost every ingredient we know increases bullying risk all show up at once:
- Resource scarcity: fewer roles, less budget, less time.
- Status threat: people fear loss of position, identity and relevance.
- Role ambiguity: who is in, who is out, who decides.
- Leadership strain: managers under pressure to cut, deliver and “keep it together” not able to commit or clarify what even they don’t know or haven’t been invited to be briefed on.
Think of a major restructure as a force that drags the context curve hard to the right. Now place an entire workforce—each person with their own history, resilience, trauma, privilege and stress—on their personal curve.
Some will move closer to the left: more empathic, more protective of colleagues, more committed to fairness. Others will move to the right: more defensive, more competitive, more willing to remove someone else’s “plank” so they can’t lose.
What looks like “suddenly they’ve become a bully” is often the visible outcome of two curves locking together in the worst possible way, and what if there is a third curve at play also on the right, perhaps trouble at home – it can easily become the perfect storm.
The Animal Brain Underneath the Org Chart
Evolutionary psychology helps make sense of this without turning it into a morality play.
Across 85 species, researchers see recurring patterns in social dominance like uniform aggression down the hierarchy, targeted aggression against close rivals, and concentrated aggression against the very vulnerable (the bullying pattern). When dominance hierarchies are stable, aggression lowers to maintenance level. But when the hierarchy is unstable—new members, scarce resources, changing ranks—conflict spikes.
A restructure is, at a nervous system level, a rank‑order earthquake. The ancient parts of our brain that tuned into “Where am I in the pack? Am I safe?” light up. Social dominance orientation research shows that some people, especially those high in dominance motives, are more willing to use aggressive strategies to stay on top in those moments.
Again, that doesn’t make it acceptable. It does make it predictable—and what’s predictable can be designed for.
So What Do We Do With This?
If bullying is better understood as a curve plus context rather than a simple label, it changes the questions we ask and the interventions we design.
Instead of only:
“Who is the bully and how do we remove them?”
We might also ask:
- Where are our curves right now?
- How stressed, depleted, scared or overloaded are our people?
- How scarce and threatening is the environment we’ve created?
- What nudges people right along the curve here?
- Is aggressive behaviour rewarded?
- Do restructures and performance processes strip out dignity and voice?
- What nudges people back toward their better nature?
- Do we make it safe to admit fear without needing to dominate?
- Do leaders name the pressure explicitly and protect standards of respect anyway?
The research is clear that systemic factors—job design, leadership behaviour, culture, and psychological safety—are core drivers of bullying prevalence. High‑bullying climates damage even those who are never directly targeted; everyone ends up walking on eggshells. That’s what happens when the whole organisation’s context curve drifts right and stays there.
An Invitation, Not an Indictment
For me, thinking in curves is oddly hopeful.
If bullying were a fixed identity, then the work would just be hunting “bad apples.” The evidence tells us that approach fails; the system simply recruits new people into the same roles.
If bullying is a position on a curve, shaped by history and context, then:
- We can notice when we ourselves are sliding right.
- We can create conditions that make it easier for everyone to stay nearer the acceptable behaviour centre for the org.
- We can design restructures, performance management and competition in ways that don’t require someone else to be “bait” for us to feel safe.
The question I’m left with—and I’d love your reflections on this—is:
When you look back at the most pressured moments in your career, where were you on your curve? And what, or who, helped you move back toward your ‘better nature’?
Because if these curves can shift us towards bullying, they can also be shifted back—toward courage, honesty and the kind of leadership that refuses to win by taking away someone else’s right to run the race at all.
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