Page 10 - COMENIUS MANAGEMENT REVIEW

8
usually stands in coherence with a negative company’s atmosphere. When employees attack each
other in interpersonal conflicts or when they make their superior victim of those conflicts, such a
behaviour does not match the goals of a company. Unexpected and unplanned damages may be
caused to the company. On the contrary, when management of a company makes a disliked
employee victim of the attacks of interpersonal conflicts in order to force him to quit the job, then it
is an intended fluctuation measure that might not be necessarily pragmatic or ethical.
Depending on the kind of work, considerable investment costs arise in the company through
re-employment of personnel, e.g. advertisement costs, recruitment, interviews, training, education
etc that correspond a yearly salary. The lower the fluctuation, the smaller are the associated costs.
Therefore it is very important for the company to place special interest on the choice of a person,
who will not become a stressor or victim (Esser/Wolmerath 1999; Brommer 1995).
Interpersonal Conflicts as a Phenomenon
The general view became focused because of public discussions and thus the way was paved
for scientific research of the phenomenon. One can see the start for the solution of the Interpersonal
Conflicts since the end of the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's. Scientists, physicians, health
insurance companies and various employers have started to deal with the subject matter "Mobbing”.
Also the European press has already taken up the problem, even though the international (and
especially the US-American) coverage ignores the problem up to now. Just in the era of the
‘Shareholder Value’ the interests of the employees are less important. Subsequently this is
astonishing, because dealing with the complex phenomenon it concerns Business Science as well as
other scientific fields, as there are Pedagogy, Sociology or Psychology.
Therefore the central objective exists in the representation of mobbing as a complex and
multi-layered problem, which concerns all social fields and structures and which should be an
object of scientific research in the future. Meanwhile the first points in internal Human Resources
can be recognized, which are dealing in a systematic and scientific way with hostilities at the job.
Considerably this is a blatant call for action, because a social mechanism of ousting has been
observed up to now. This is being influenced because of people's fear to be concerned for
themselves. In view of the increasing readiness of the society for violence this is not astonishing,
really. Mobbing can be found in all professions and lines of business, and evenly distributed
between the sexes. Dealing with the subject matter has been strongly influenced from the whole