Understanding workplace gaslighting, what it is and how it manifests, can help us maintain our balance at work, where we have unfortunately become accustomed to various forms of misrepresentation and inappropriateness from bosses and colleagues.

Aside from the rhetoric of large companies, offices, shops, and production centres are full of relationships between workers that are anything but virtuous.

What is gaslighting?

In a simplistic way, the history of this term originated in a 1944 film, Gaslight: in it, Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, notices the gradual fading of the gas lights in her home, but her husband, responsible for the phenomenon, denies it, leading her to a state of confusion bordering on insanity.

But it was in the 1970s that the term gaslighting began to circulate in the United States , which describes “a series of manipulative behaviours (such as providing false information or denying what has just been said) deliberately activated to undermine the victim's basic trust.”

It is a topic that remains extremely current and is the focus of the book of the same name by Hélène Frappat, in which the author, starting from the world of cinema, analyses this form of psychological violence, particularly in the kind of manifestations that affect women.

The different faces of workplace gaslighting

Even at work, albeit in more subtle forms, this form of psychological manipulation is widespread, with bosses and colleagues sowing doubt in our minds about what happened for their own benefit.

Practical examples include cases that, unfortunately, sound more familiar than we like to think: a boss who gives us credit by making us appear visionary, another who diminishes our contribution to achieving an objective, another who denies having assigned us a task that he communicated to us verbally.

However, don’t think that it only happens in face-to-face interactions: as Annalisa Dordoni, a labour sociologist at the University of Milan-Bicocca, explains to GQ Italia, “the gaslighting phenomenon is a set of attempts to create a surreal social environment by questioning the mental faculties of the other person.

Gaslighting is also a behaviour in which an individual tries to influence another’s judgment by making them doubt the validity of their criteria, and a dysfunctional communication dynamic in which an interlocutor tries to destabilize another person’s sense of reality, for example on the Internet.”

And be careful, gaslighting at work does not only affect bosses, but also occurs among colleagues: “There can be vertical and horizontal directions, the former in the form of a hierarchical line between bosses and employees, and the latter as extreme forms of competition between colleagues.

In both senses, it is about applying to the relational mode a principle that is the same: to maintain or obtain power, one must subdue the other, even if it is a colleague at the same level.”

The motivations and possible consequences of gaslighting

Why manipulate a co-worker? The answer is most often found in the search for control in the work environment, while many times it is found in management needs that cannot be addressed by more appropriate means.

An example of this are companies that, for a variety of reasons, are forced to demand more demanding rhythms from their employees, only to deny the real increase in workloads and not have to compensate them with bonuses and other benefits.

However, in some cases, this increase is undeniable: for office workers, it would be enough to compare the emails they received in a very busy year with those from a period with a more bearable pace to have almost irrefutable proof.

As expected, the contexts in which workplace gaslighting proliferates are far from healthy: “this relational mode based on submission, control and, in fact, simple competition, creates extremely unfavourable environments for teamwork, for achieving objectives considered a common and collective responsibility,” Dordoni continues.

In some cases, the consequences are quite serious, because for those who make a large investment in the performance of their work, being questioned based on facts that did not happen can even lead to a collapse of confidence and a feeling of helplessness , with experiences ranging from pathological anxiety to depression.

Are companies aware of workplace gaslighting?

The phenomenon of gaslighting is so widespread that in recent years it has led to the emergence of “reflections on the possible strategies used by management to maintain control”; some of which are reaffirming that the forms of leadership we need are those “based on cooperation, as well as coordination, capable of building a relaxed and inclusive work environment, in network mode, in which the energies and efforts of everyone converge towards a common goal, and without compromising human and social relations,” concludes Dordoni.

[ Via GQ Mexico]