Dr Doron Samuell knows a thing or two about workplace bullies. As the CEO of Corporate Health Services, a health and safety advisory group, he works closely with employers and regulatory bodies to deal with bullying claims.

“There have been some very clear cut and tragic cases where people have been bullied to the point where they have seriously harmed themselves,” Dr Samuell said.

“But in general they don’t represent the majority of cases of bullying that I’ve seen.”

In his experience, many cases of “bullying” are in fact interpersonal conflicts between employees who do not get along.

There is no clear perpetrator or victim, simply two people whose personalities clash.

In Dr Samuell’s view, bullying is highly subjective. Some people label any behaviour that makes them uncomfortable “bullying”, such as a change of duties or criticism from a supervisor.

The most common complaints Dr Samuell hears are of being over-worked, under-worked, micromanaged or marginalised.

While these experiences are unpleasant, they do not constitute bullying in most cases.

Dr Samuell believes this tendency to mislabel normal workplace conflict as bullying may be why women are over-represented among claimants.

“Women tend to be employed in industries where there are institutional employers such as caring industries, administration, public service. All of these industries have a lot of interpersonal contact,” he said.

“Because women are working with other people to a very large extent, naturally not everyone gets along with each other and of course mistakes are made in communicating with one another. So it’s obvious that women would tend to have more grievances arising out of the workplace.”

Moreover, women in general tend to suffer more mental illness than men, including depression.

According to Dr Samuell, most complaints of bullying by women are not specific to their gender.

“I can count on one hand the number of women who say they have been discriminated against because of pregnancy or family type issues,” he said.

For this reason, he found former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s announcement of an enquiry into gender discrimination in the workplace disappointing.

“What is a significant problem is that there is a lot of interpersonal conflict. The task of any government is to improve our culture,” he said.

“Right now, having an enquiry and putting in umpires that label people as victims or perpetrators is very unhelpful.”

His preference would be to see an increase in funding for alternative dispute resolution to address conflict within workplaces.

However, he believes the best approach to bullying claims is for the two people to work it out between themselves.

“My suggestion to any person who feels like they are being bullied or mistreated is to maturely and calmly discuss the problem with the person whom you believe is causing the problem,” he said.

“As soon as third parties get involved, it is usually a long, protracted and painful process. Often there is no clear winner.”

He counsels people to try to maintain perspective, to act in a measured fashion and to try to appropriately communicate their concerns.

If the informal approach is unsuccessful, he believes that active and empathetic Human Resources managers can play a key role.

“To get the most out of any workforce, you’d like people to be working in a harmonious fashion. A good HR manager will be monitoring the workplace dynamics and will be putting in efforts to make sure the workplace does meet the professional needs of all its members,” he said.

This combination of in-tune management, personal responsibility and dispute resolution may do more to combat bullying claims than any anti-bullying training.