When addressing incidences of workplace psychosocial harm it is important to understand and address the root cause. A recent whitepaper from Australian Psychological Services asks “what if the very system used to record and report incidents into the system actually obscured the root conditions that most powerfully predict psychosocial harm? “
The average Australian employee and their employers are more familiar with the hazards of bullying and harassment than they are with upstream risk factors such as poor role clarity, high job demands and poor organisational justice. This can influence both reporting language and organisational policy and practice to focus on the resulting harmful behaviour and not the true root cause.
Psychological harm rarely stems from just one factor. Instead, it almost always emerges from the interaction of multiple risks over time. Yet, because reporting frameworks require attribution to a single mechanism per injury, the factor that is last in the chain of contributors is most recognised by the system, easiest to classify, and often becomes the default ‘cause.’ In many cases, these behaviours are not the root problem but rather the final contributor in a long chain of unaddressed stressors.
Data from the Australian Psychological Services’ Mibo Psychosocial Risk Management Assessment (PRMA) and independently evaluated by the Griffith University RISE Research Centre, shows a pattern that indicates bullying and harassment are almost always the downstream outcomes of broader organisational stressors.
The current system of recording and reporting incidents for 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 do not capture the full range of workplace psychosocial hazards. This process oversimplifies complex workplace realities and the resulting distorted picture of risk mis-directs management focus away from considering multi-causal factors.
The reporting protocols for the workers’ compensation system are clearly ripe for review, now that the Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 have come into effect, but on a more local level when working with employers on managing psychosocial hazards in your workplace, HSRs can direct employer attention to identifying the upstream hazards that create the conditions in which the harmful behaviour can occur.
Use resources such as WorkSafe’s Psychological Health page and the Compliance code: Psychological health, to show your employers how they can learn to identify, assess, control and review the risk factors that contribute to a poor psychosocial safety climate. Using the tools provided in the Compliance Code employers can remedy the management level factors that create the conditions in which psychosocial risks grow into incivility and escalate into what workers later experience as bullying or harassment.
Read more: Beyond Harmful Behaviour Bias | Whitepaper