Beyond Harmful Behaviour Bias: Targeting Upstream Psychosocial Risks to Reduce Harm

Workers’ compensation data is often used to identify leading causes of psychological injury in Australia. However, the way the system classifies claims tends to overstate the role of harmful behaviours like bullying and harassment. These behaviours are damaging and unacceptable, but in most cases they’re not the primary cause of harm, rather they’re the outcome of a complex web of psychosocial risk factors.

In this paper we outline the limitations of the workers compensation system, why it inflates the role of bullying and harassment in causing workplace harm, and how we can move towards better insights via next generation data analysis.

The Limits of the Workers’ Compensation Data System

The workers’ compensation system requires the assignment of a single mechanism to each injury. Injury managers must choose from a narrow list of factors, such as bullying, harassment, or work pressure, that does not capture the full range of workplace psychosocial hazards.

This process oversimplifies complex realities. Psychological harm rarely stems from just one factor. Instead, it almost always emerges from the interaction of multiple risks over time. Yet, because the framework requires attribution to only one category, the factor that is last in the chain of contributors, most recognised by the system, or easiest to classify, often becomes the ‘cause.’

In many cases, these behaviours are not the root problem but rather the ‘final straw’ in a long chain of unaddressed stressors. By reducing multi-causal outcomes into one-dimensional categories, the system creates an over representation of downstream harmful behaviours like bullying and harassment, while upstream hazards that more powerfully contribute to harm remain under-recognised.

The result is a distorted picture of risk that shapes regulatory priorities and, in turn, biases organisational focus toward exposure to harmful behaviours rather than addressing more fundamental causal factors.

How Awareness Shapes Reporting

Additionally, today’s employees are generally more familiar with bullying and harassment than with many other psychosocial hazards that contribute to psychological harm. Consequently, when harm occurs, they’re more likely to attribute it to these factors that are also more readily recognised and accepted within the compensation system. This can obscure the cumulative influence of upstream factors such as:

• A lack of organisational care
• High job demands
• Organisational injustice
• Poor role clarity
• Unsuitable change management

It is these factors that often create the conditions in which psychosocial risks grow first into incivility, and escalate into what workers later experience as bullying or harassment.

A Practical Example

Consider an organisation where psychological health and safety aren’t highly valued by senior management. A poorly managed change project is then introduced involving:

• Decisions made without suitable worker consultation, creating a sense of unfairness
• Job demands increasing without additional resources, and 
• Leadership instability leading to poor direct leader support

Without adequate organisational care to limit initial hazard exposure, or processes to detect and address upstream risk early, frustration and fear rise. Incivility becomes normalised as staff react to stress and uncertainty. Although this behaviour causes a continuous environment of high harm, it is dismissed as ‘low-level’ and goes unreported.

Over time, the incivility escalates until behaviours are recognised as bullying or harassment. At this point, workers begin lodging compensation claims, which are recorded solely as ‘bullying.’ Yet the reality is that this was the culmination of a lack of organisational care, and months of unmanaged psychosocial risk. Without those upstream stressors, the issues would not have escalated. 

Moving Toward More Accurate Insights

In Australia, the leading mechanism attributed to serious mental health claims is work-related harassment and/or workplace bullying (33.2%), with sexual harassment an additional attribution. These statistics have shaped the public discourse and regulatory agenda, in turn, influencing organisational focus.

However, longitudinal research shows that Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC), the shared organisational perception of policies, practices, and procedures for protecting worker psychological health, predicts workplace bullying over 4 years. And strengthening PSC, in part through improved work design and effective conflict resolution procedures, has been shown to reduce bullying. This evidence highlights that harmful interpersonal behaviours are typically the downstream consequence of deeper long-term organisational conditions.

So what happens when we broaden the workers’ compensation lens to include the full spectrum of psychosocial contributors to harm? 

Drawing on 500,000 data points from the Mibo Psychosocial Risk Management Assessment (PRMA), independently evaluated by the Griffith University RISE Research Centre and recognised for its’ high validity and reliability, the picture is clear:

• Other psychosocial work factors are 9.5 times more likely than bullying, harassment, and sexual harassment to be reported as contributing high or very high harm to mental health.

And when the cumulative impact of the psychosocial environment is explored through advanced data analysis, the story becomes even more compelling:

• Less than 1% of workers report high or very high harm from bullying or harassment unless they also report high or very high harm from at least one upstream factor.
• And the likelihood of reporting such harm increases dramatically as upstream risks accumulate: 0.79% with no upstream factors, 26.9% with at least one, 44.9% with at least three, and 57.1% with at least five.

The pattern indicates bullying and harassment are almost always the downstream outcomes of broader organisational stressors.

Which upstream factors most influence bullying, harassment, and sexual harassment?

The top five most influential factors: Unfairness, Emotional Demands, Cognitive Demands, Productivity Hindrances, and Incivility, account for 46.44% of the incidence of bullying exposure.

Similarly, Unfairness, Emotional Demands, Cognitive Demands, Productivity Hindrances, Incivility, and Counterproductive Behaviour together explain 35.05% of the incidence of harassment exposure.

So to meaningfully reduce harmful workplace behaviours, the highest priority should be addressing these influential upstream work factors, the root conditions that most powerfully predict bullying and harassment risks downstream. 

Organisational and Industry Benefits

The current workers’ compensation system inflates the perceived proportion of psychological harm attributed to workplace bullying and harassment. While these outcomes must be addressed, effective management requires recognising they are often symptoms of deeper systemic risks.

Next-generation tools like Mibo enable organisations to assess and analyse PSC, the cumulative effects of a full range of upstream risks and protective factors, and identify those that most strongly influence downstream harm. This equips leaders to build a supportive environment that better:

• Prevents initial hazard exposure
• Detects and addresses upstream risks early
• Reduces the likelihood of downstream harmful interpersonal behaviours

For the workers’ compensation industry, greater sophistication in data reporting and more effective promotion of preventative approaches are needed. This can help reduce compensation claims and improve return-to-work outcomes through a deeper understanding of causation.

Ultimately, better systems and insights allow both organisations and insurers to priotitise and address what influences harm, creating healthier workplaces and more effective compensation outcomes.

References:

Maureen F Dollard, Christian Dormann, Michelle R. Tuckey & Jordi Escartín (2017) Psychosocial safety climate (PSC) and enacted PSC for workplace bullying and psychological health problem reduction, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 26:6, 844-857, DOI: 10.1080/1359432X.2017.1380626

Safe Work Australia. (2025, October). Key Work and Health Safety Statistics Australia 2025. 

https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/insights/key-whs-statistics-australia/latest-release