Beyond Harmful Behaviour Bias: Targeting Upstream Psychosocial Behaviours to Reduce Harm
The Safe Work Australia Key Work Health and Safety Statistics 2025 were released in October
Among the most alarming stats are that harmful psychosocial behaviours; harassment and bullying are again the leading mechanism of serious mental health claims at 33.2%.
But does this tell the real story?
In this Whitepaper David Burroughs and Sean Fyfe reveal crucial statistics that reveal why we must target upstream psychosocial risks if we want to most efficiently reduce harmful workplace behaviours….
Beyond Harmful Behaviour Bias: Targeting Upstream Psychosocial Behaviours 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 psychosocial behaviours like bullying and harassment.
These psychosocial 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. Understanding the distinction between downstream behaviours (like bullying) and upstream psychosocial factors (like organisational unfairness) is critical for effective psychosocial risk management.
In this paper we outline the limitations of the workers compensation system, why it inflates the role of certain behaviours in causing workplace harm, and how we can move towards better insights via next generation data analysis that examines the full spectrum of behaviours contributing to psychological injury.
Contents
The Limits of the Workers’ Compensation Data System Examines how the workers’ compensation system’s single-cause approach distorts psychosocial behaviour data, highlighting how deeper systemic factors driving harmful behaviours are overlooked.
How Awareness Shapes Reporting Explores how employees’ greater awareness of certain harmful psychosocial behaviours shapes reporting patterns while other influential factors remain unrecognised.
Moving Toward More Accurate Insights Reveals that harmful behaviours like bullying and harassment stem from deeper organisational factors, with upstream factors like unfairness and high demands driving most psychological harm.
Organisational and Industry Benefits Explores how next-generation tools like Mibo enable organisations to identify and address the full range of factors, helping prevent harm and create healthier, more effective workplaces.
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 behaviours and hazards.
This process oversimplifies complex realities surrounding psychosocial behaviours.
Psychological harm rarely stems from just one type of psychosocial behaviour. Instead, it almost always emerges from the interaction of multiple risk factors over time. Yet, because the framework requires attribution to only one category, the psychosocial behaviour 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 harmful psychosocial behaviours are not the root problem but rather the ‘final straw’ in a long chain of unaddressed stressors and problematic organisational psychosocial factors.
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 psychosocial risks that more powerfully contribute to harm remain under-recognised.
The result is a distorted picture of which factors actually drive risk. This shapes regulatory priorities and, in turn, biases organisational focus toward exposure to certain harmful behaviours rather than addressing the more fundamental factors that create conditions for harm.
This typically leads to controls focusing narrowly on awareness training about inappropriate psychosocial behaviours and reporting by defining harmful behaviours, telling people not to commit them, and outlining reporting pathways. Yet they rarely address the organisational relational conditions that allow bullying and harassment to develop and persist.
How Awareness Shapes Reporting of Psychosocial Behaviours
Additionally, today’s employees are generally more familiar with certain psychosocial behaviours like bullying and harassment than with many other psychosocial hazards that contribute to harm.
Consequently, when harm occurs, they’re more likely to attribute it to these well-known behaviours that are also more readily recognised and accepted within the compensation system.
This can obscure the cumulative influence of upstream psychosocial factors such as:
- Lack of organisational care
- Poor role clarity
- High job demands
- Unsuitable change management
- Organisational injustice
It is these upstream psychosocial conditions that often create the conditions in which psychosocial risks grow. Poor organisational psychosocial demands first manifest as incivility, then escalate into what workers later experience as bullying or harassment.
A Practical Example of Escalating Psychosocial Behaviours
Consider an organisation where psychological health and safety aren’t highly valued by senior management, reflected in their decision-making. 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
- Leadership instability leading to poor direct leader support
Without adequate organisational care to limit initial hazard exposure, or processes to detect and address upstream psychosocial issues early, frustration and fear rise. Negative behaviours like incivility become normalised as staff react to stress and uncertainty. Although these counterproductive behaviours cause a continuous environment of high harm, they are dismissed as ‘low-level’ and go unreported.
Over time, these unchecked behaviours escalate 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 harmful psychosocial behaviour was the culmination of months of problematic unmanaged psychosocial risk.
Without those upstream psychosocial factors creating toxic conditions, the issues would not have escalated to bullying.
Moving Toward More Accurate Insights About Psychosocial Behaviours
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 about specific psychosocial behaviours 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 workers’ psychological health—predicts workplace bullying and other harmful behaviours over time. Strengthening PSC, particularly through improved work design and effective conflict resolution procedures, has been shown to reduce harmful psychosocial behaviours including bullying.
Further, Professor Michelle Tuckey, a leading Australian researcher on the systemic origins of harmful workplace behaviours, emphasises the importance of understanding organisational systems. Her research demonstrates that poor job design and resource deficits create conditions where harmful psychosocial behaviours can emerge, and that people-management practices and leadership psychosocial behaviours strongly predict exposure to bullying, even beyond established factors such as PSC.
Together, this evidence underscores that harmful interpersonal behaviours are rarely isolated incidents, but rather downstream consequences of deeper, long-term problematic organisational psychosocial conditions.
What Happens When We Examine All Psychosocial Factors?
So what happens when we broaden the workers’ compensation lens to include the full spectrum of psychosocial factors contributing to harm?
Drawing on more than 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 about psychosocial behaviours 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 full range of psychosocial factors 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 psychosocial behaviours unless they also report high or very high harm from at least one upstream psychosocial factor.
- The likelihood of reporting harmful behaviours like bullying increases dramatically as upstream problematic psychosocial factors accumulate:
| Number of Upstream Psychosocial Factors | Likelihood of Reported High Bullying/Harassment Harm |
|---|---|
| None | 0.79% |
| At least one | 26.9% |
| At least three | 44.9% |
| At least five | 57.1% |
The pattern indicates that harmful behaviours like bullying and harassment are almost always the downstream outcomes of broader problematic organisational psychosocial stressors.
Which Upstream Psychosocial Factors Drive Bullying and Harassment?
So which upstream psychosocial factors most powerfully drive the occurrence of bullying, harassment, and sexual harassment—identified through Mibo’s advanced machine learning analytic techniques that reveal causal, not merely correlational, relationships between different psychosocial factors?
The top five most influential psychosocial factors:
- Unfairness (organisational justice psychosocial behaviours)
- Emotional Demands (work-related psychosocial behaviours)
- Cognitive Demands (workload psychosocial behaviours)
- Productivity Hindrances (systemic psychosocial behaviours)
- Incivility (interpersonal psychosocial behaviours)
Together, these upstream psychosocial factors account for 46.44% of the incidence of bullying exposure.
Similarly, for harassment:
- Unfairness
- Emotional Demands
- Cognitive Demands
- Productivity Hindrances
- Incivility
- Counterproductive Behaviour
Together, these psychosocial factors 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 psychosocial 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 specific workplace psychosocial behaviours like bullying and harassment. While these harmful behaviours must be addressed, effective management requires recognising they are often symptoms of deeper systemic psychosocial risks.
Next-generation tools like Mibo enable organisations to assess and analyse PSC, the cumulative effects of the full range of upstream psychosocial factors, protective and risk factors, and identify those psychosocial behaviours that most strongly influence downstream harm.
This equips leaders to build a supportive environment that better:
Prevents Initial Exposure to Harmful Psychosocial Behaviours By addressing problematic organisational psychosocial factors and work design issues before they create conditions for interpersonal harm.
Detects and Addresses Problematic Psychosocial Behaviours Early Through regular monitoring of the full spectrum of behaviours—from leadership behaviours to peer interactions to organisational justice.
Reduces the Likelihood of Downstream Harmful Interpersonal Psychosocial Behaviours By eliminating the upstream psychosocial risks (unfairness, excessive demands, incivility) that create conditions where bullying and harassment emerge.
Industry Benefits
For the workers’ compensation industry, greater sophistication in data reporting about psychosocial factors and more effective promotion of preventative approaches targeting upstream psychosocial risks are needed. This can help reduce compensation claims and improve return-to-work outcomes through a deeper understanding of which psychosocial behaviours actually cause harm.
Ultimately, better systems and insights that examine the full range of psychosocial risks allow both organisations and insurers to prioritise and address what truly influences harm, creating healthier workplaces and more effective compensation outcomes.
Conclusion: A Complete Picture
Understanding psychosocial behaviours requires looking beyond the obvious. While bullying and harassment are serious harmful behaviours requiring response, they are rarely the root cause. Instead, they represent the downstream manifestation of problematic organisational psychosocial factors, poor leadership behaviours, and systemic issues that create conditions where interpersonal harm can flourish.
By expanding our focus to include the full spectrum of psychosocial risks, from organisational justice and change management to workload allocation and emotional demands, we can identify and address the upstream psychosocial factors that actually drive psychological harm.
This comprehensive understanding of psychosocial behaviours enables more effective prevention, more accurate risk assessment, and ultimately, healthier Australian workplaces where harmful behaviours are rare because the conditions that enable them no longer exist.
Authors
Sean Fyfe Founder, Managing Director at Mibo
David Burroughs Chief Mental Health Officer Westpac, Founder and Principal Psychologist – Australian Psychological Services
References
Dollard, M. F., Dormann, C., Tuckey, M. R., & Escartín, J. (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. https://doi.org/10.1080/135943
2X.2017.1380626
Tuckey, M. R., Dollard, M. F., & Neall, A. M. (2012). Job demands, resource deficiencies, and
workplace harassment: Evidence for micro-level effects. International Journal of Stress
Management, 19(4), 292–310. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030326
Tuckey, M. R., & Neall, A. M. (2022). Workplace bullying as an organizational problem: Spotlight
on people management practices. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public
Health, 19(21), 14256. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192114256
Safe Work Australia. (2025, October). Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025.
