The Duty Of A Supervisor And Manager To Eliminate Workplace Bullying

What a Supervisor Is Personally Responsible for in Workplace Bullying

Most guidance on workplace bullying is addressed to the organisation. This page is addressed to you.

That distinction matters because the exposure is not all the same exposure. Some of it sits with the business and reaches you only through your employer. Some of it has your name on it.

Four things sit personally with a supervisor or line manager:

• Your own conduct: You owe a duty as a worker to take reasonable care that what you do, or fail to do, does not put someone else’s health and safety at risk
• Being named: A stop bullying application names individuals, not just the employer, and the named person responds on their own form
• Involvement in a contravention: The Fair Work Act reaches individuals who were involved in a breach, and it explicitly reaches managers and HR
• Your response when you are told: Not a separate legal duty so much as the thing that decides how every other exposure lands, including your employer’s

This article is about those four. For what workplace bullying is, how it differs from ordinary conflict, and what the Fair Work Commission can and cannot do about it, start with our guide to workplace bullying and conflict.

In short, it is repeated unreasonable behaviour towards a worker that creates a risk to health and safety, and intention is not part of the test.

The Workplace Bullying Duty Most Managers Think They Have, and Do Not

Start with a correction, because a great deal of manager training gets this wrong and it leads people to worry about the wrong thing.

Section 27 of the Work Health and Safety Act places a due diligence duty on officers.

It has six limbs: acquire and keep up to date knowledge of work health and safety matters, understand the operations and their hazards and risks, ensure the business has and uses appropriate resources and processes, ensure there are processes for receiving and considering information about incidents, ensure there are processes for complying with duties, and verify that all of that is actually happening.

That is a governance duty, and most supervisors and line managers do not hold it.

Safe Work Australia’s guidance is clear that an officer is someone who makes, or participates in making, decisions affecting the whole or a substantial part of the business, or who can significantly affect its financial standing.

It describes officers as making higher level decisions that are organisational and strategic rather than operational decisions about day to day work.

A manager or supervisor who primarily implements decisions, rather than determining how the business operates, is unlikely to be an officer.

Your Real Duty as a Worker, and How Workplace Bullying Engages It

Every worker, including every supervisor and manager, owes duties under section 28 of the Work Health and Safety Act.

In substance they are to take reasonable care for your own health and safety, to take reasonable care that your acts or omissions do not adversely affect the health and safety of other people, to comply with reasonable instructions, and to cooperate with the policies and procedures you have been told about.

The second of those is the one that matters here, and it is worth reading slowly. It covers acts and omissions. It is about the effect on other people, not about what you meant. And health includes psychological health.

So a manager engages it in two different ways.

• By what you do: Conduct towards a team member that is repeated, unreasonable and creates a risk to their health and safety
• By what you leave undone: Knowing that workplace bullying is happening in your team and not acting on it. That is an omission, and the duty covers omissions

The second route is the one managers do not see coming. You do not have to be the person doing it to have a problem. You have to have known, and done nothing.

You Can Be Named Personally in a Workplace Bullying Application

This is the most concrete form the exposure takes, and it surprises people.

An application to the Fair Work Commission for an order to stop workplace bullying is not made only against the employer.

The worker names the individuals they say bullied them. Those individuals are then given the chance to respond in their own right, on their own form, separately from the employer’s response.

So there is a document with your name on it, and a response that is yours to make rather than your employer’s. Two things follow from that.

1. Your interests and your employer’s may not be identical: Usually they align. Occasionally they do not, particularly where the organisation’s position is that you acted outside your authority or against policy. That is a moment to get your own advice rather than assume the company is speaking for you.
2. An order can be directed at you: The Commission can order an individual to stop specified behaviour. It cannot fine you and it cannot order you to pay anything, because the jurisdiction is preventative rather than compensatory, but an order naming you is a matter of record.

The realistic picture, though, is that very few applications reach an order at all. Most are withdrawn or resolved before determination.

What resolves them is almost always what the organisation and the manager did once the complaint was raised, which brings everything back to your response.

Personal Liability When a Manager Is Involved in a Workplace Bullying Contravention

Separately from the bullying jurisdiction, section 550 of the Fair Work Act makes a person who was involved in a contravention liable as if they had committed it themselves.

The Fair Work Ombudsman is explicit that this reaches HR managers and other managers, alongside directors, payroll officers and accountants.

A person is involved if they assisted, recommended or caused the contravention, influenced it, were knowingly concerned in it or a party to it, or conspired with others in a way that produced it.

Where this bites in a workplace bullying context is usually not the bullying itself but what happens around it.

Adverse action taken against someone because they made a complaint is a general protections matter, and a manager who recommended or carried out that action can be personally liable for it.

So can a manager who was knowingly concerned in a dismissal engineered to remove a complainant.

Unlike the stop bullying jurisdiction, this one does carry money. Individuals can be ordered to pay penalties and to make good employee entitlements.

Anti-discrimination law works similarly where the conduct targets a protected attribute. A person who causes, instructs, induces, aids or permits unlawful conduct can be liable in their own right, and the employer can be liable as well.

What Personal Liability for Workplace Bullying Can Actually Cost

Duties stated in the abstract do not change behaviour. The numbers behind them sometimes do, so here is what sits behind the worker duty described above.

Work health and safety breaches are prosecuted in three categories, and the maximums differ by whether you are an individual worker, an individual acting as an officer or a business in your own right, or a body corporate. These are the ranges across Australian jurisdictions as at 1 August 2025.

Read those honestly, because the wrong conclusion is easy to draw. These are maximum penalties, not typical outcomes, and the ranges are wide because they differ by state and territory.

Prosecutions of an individual worker over a psychosocial matter alone are uncommon.

Nobody should read this table and conclude that a supervisor who mishandles a workplace bullying complaint is facing a six figure fine, because that is not what usually happens.

What the table does show is how seriously the law treats the duty, and that the duty genuinely attaches to individuals rather than only to the business.

That matters more now than it did five years ago, because psychosocial hazards are explicitly inside the work health and safety regime in every jurisdiction, which puts workplace bullying on the same footing as a physical hazard for enforcement purposes.

On the Fair Work side, penalties are set in penalty units that rise periodically, so the dollar figures move.

The structural points are the ones worth knowing: an individual found to have been involved in a contravention faces the same penalty framework as the employer, a serious contravention attracts up to ten times the standard maximum, and a court can order an individual to pay employee entitlements as well as a penalty.

For most supervisors, though, the realistic exposure is not a fine at all. It is being named in an application, having your conduct examined in a claim your employer is defending, and the career consequence of a finding that you knew and did nothing.

How Your Organisation’s Workplace Bullying Liability Depends on What You Did

Employers are generally liable for what their managers do in connection with employment.

That is what vicarious liability means, and it is why a workplace bullying complaint about one supervisor becomes an organisational problem very quickly.

But the liability is not automatic in every jurisdiction, and where the employer has a defence it usually turns on whether reasonable steps were taken.

In practice, most of those steps are things a supervisor either did or did not do: whether the policy was communicated to the team, whether training was completed, whether a report was acted on, whether the behaviour was addressed when it first appeared.

The uncomfortable version of that, stated plainly: when an organisation defends a workplace bullying claim, the evidence it needs is mostly a record of what its managers did.

If you did the right things and nobody wrote them down, your organisation is defending the claim without its best evidence, and you are relying on memory.

What Workplace Bullying Looks Like When It Comes from a Manager

Australian survey evidence puts the source of workplace bullying as a supervisor in around six cases out of ten, well ahead of co-workers.

That is not a claim that most managers bully people. It is a reflection of where the power sits, because the same behaviour has more effect coming down the line than across it.

Manager-sourced workplace bullying tends to be structural rather than loud, which is why it runs for a long time before anyone names it.

• Through the work itself: Setting deadlines that are impossible only for one person, withdrawing the work someone needs to demonstrate competence, assigning tasks well below or above their role to make a point, changing priorities and then criticising the outcome
• Through access: Leaving one person off meetings and email chains, withholding information they need, cutting them out of decisions they used to be in
• Through process: Using performance management to punish rather than to improve, raising old matters repeatedly, threatening job security in passing
• Through the way things are said: Public criticism, sarcasm about someone’s competence in front of the team, shouting, and jokes always aimed at the same person
• Through what is not said: Sustained cold-shouldering, refusing to engage, being conspicuously available to everyone except one person
• Online and after hours: Messages, group chats and email carry all of the above, and behaviour at a work function or on a work trip is still connected to the work

Almost none of that looks like bullying in a single instance. Every item on that list has an innocent explanation once.

The pattern is the thing, and the person best placed to see a pattern forming in their own conduct is the manager, if they are willing to look.

Managing Performance Without It Becoming Workplace Bullying

Managers who learn about workplace bullying often become nervous about managing at all.

That is the wrong lesson and it does real damage, because unmanaged underperformance is itself a source of team resentment and conflict.

Reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is not workplace bullying. The protection is real. It just has three parts, and all three have to hold.

• It has to be management action: Setting expectations, allocating work, giving feedback, performance managing, investigating, disciplining, restructuring, refusing a request. Excluding someone from a project because you find them difficult is not management action
• The action has to be reasonable: A genuine work reason, and proportionate to it
• The manner has to be reasonable too: This is the limb managers lose. A justified performance conversation delivered by shouting, in front of others, by email at 11pm, or with no notice of what the concern is, stops being protected

The practical test before you act: could you explain the work reason to someone neutral, today, in one sentence, and would you be comfortable with them seeing how you delivered it?

If the answer to either half is no, change the delivery rather than abandoning the action.

Our pillar guide covers the reasonable management action exclusion in more depth, including why intention is not a defence.

What to Do When Someone Tells You About Workplace Bullying

How you handle the first conversation matters more than almost anything else you will do, and the research on psychological injury is consistent that speed of response predicts outcomes better than the severity of the incident.

• Take it seriously in the moment: Do not assess it on the spot, do not tell them it is probably a misunderstanding, and do not suggest they may be taking it the wrong way
• Do not promise confidentiality you cannot deliver: Tell them honestly who will need to know and why. Promising secrecy and then breaking it destroys the relationship and the process at once
• Make them safe first: If there is a continuing risk, deal with the exposure before you deal with the facts. That may mean changing a roster or a reporting line temporarily, and it should never look like a penalty on the person who spoke up
• Write it down the same day: What they said, what you said, what you agreed, what you did next
• Do not investigate it yourself if it is serious, and never if it involves you
• Do not put the two people in a room together to sort it out: Mediation is designed for conflict between people on equal ground. Applied to bullying it puts the burden on the person being harmed
• Come back to them: The most common complaint about how organisations handle these matters is not the outcome, it is silence afterwards

For the decision itself, whether this is bullying or conflict, whether it can be resolved locally, and whether it needs to go further, work through the six considerations for supervisors and managers.

When a Workplace Bullying Matter Has to Leave Your Hands

Knowing when to stop handling something yourself is part of the job, not an admission that you cannot manage your team. Escalate when any of these is true.

• The allegation is about you, or about someone you report to
• There is any allegation of violence, threats, sexual harassment or criminal conduct. These do not go through a bullying process, they go to the appropriate authority and, where a crime may have occurred, to police
• The person is unwell, or you have any concern for their safety
• The conduct involves a protected attribute, which brings anti-discrimination obligations alongside
• The matter has already been raised before and nothing changed
• A formal complaint has been made, or the person has said they want one
• You would have to investigate people senior to you

Where a matter does become a formal investigation, the process has to be defensible in its own right.

Our guide to investigating a complaint of workplace bullying sets out the seven steps, including how to handle allegations that are not substantiated.

Documenting Your Response to Workplace Bullying, and Why It Protects You

Managers under-record for understandable reasons. It feels like building a case against someone, or like admitting a problem exists.

Consider what happens without it. A complaint surfaces eighteen months later, in a claim or a resignation. You know you handled the earlier conversation well.

There is nothing to show it. Your recollection is now evidence given by an interested party, and the other account is just as sincere and completely different.

What to record, and it does not need to be elaborate:

• That the conversation happened, when, and who was in it
• What was described, in their words rather than your summary of it
• What you did, and when
• What you decided and why, especially if you decided it did not need to go further
• For performance management, the work reason and the manner, because the manner is what gets tested
• Matters resolved informally, which are the ones nobody writes down and the ones that establish you acted early

Keep it factual and keep it somewhere the organisation can find it, not in your personal notebook or your sent items.

A workplace compliance system holds this properly: who was trained, who acknowledged the policy, what was reported and what was done about it.

That is what your employer needs when it has to show reasonable steps were taken, and it is what protects you individually as well.

Workplace Bullying Training for Supervisors and Managers

General staff awareness training does not prepare a manager for any of the above.

It covers what workplace bullying is and how to report it, which is necessary but is not the manager’s job.

What a supervisor actually needs is narrower and harder: the three part reasonable management action test and how to stay inside it, the fact that intention is not a defence, how to respond in the first conversation, when to escalate, what to record, and a clear-eyed view of their own personal exposure.

Sentrient’s preventing and responding to workplace bullying for supervisors and managers course covers the manager obligations specifically, and sits alongside the workplace bullying course for all staff.

Where conduct crosses into disrespect more broadly, respect at work training sets the wider standard, and managers with obligations under the positive duty should also complete sexual harassment training for supervisors and managers.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Supervisor Duty for Workplace Bullying

1. Can a Manager Be Personally Liable for Workplace Bullying?

Yes, in several ways. A manager can be named individually in a stop bullying application and responds on their own form. Under section 550 of the Fair Work Act a person involved in a contravention is liable as if they committed it, and the Fair Work Ombudsman confirms this reaches HR and line managers. Anti-discrimination law can also make an individual liable where conduct targets a protected attribute. Managers also owe a personal duty as workers under work health and safety law.

2. Do Supervisors Have the Officer Due Diligence Duty Under the WHS Act?

Usually not. The section 27 officer duty applies to people who make or participate in making decisions affecting the whole or a substantial part of the business. Safe Work Australia’s guidance says a manager or supervisor who primarily implements decisions rather than determining how the business operates is unlikely to be an officer. Supervisors owe the worker duties under section 28 instead.

3. Can a Manager Be Liable for Workplace Bullying They Did Not Do Themselves?

Yes. The worker duty covers acts and omissions, so knowing bullying is happening in your team and failing to act can engage it. Failing to act is also the fact most likely to defeat your employer’s defence that it took reasonable steps.

4. Is Performance Management Workplace Bullying?

No, provided it is reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner. All three parts must hold: it must genuinely be management action, the action must be reasonable, and the way it is delivered must be reasonable too. Justified performance management delivered by shouting, in public, or with no notice of the concern loses the protection.

5. What Should a Supervisor Do First When Told About Workplace Bullying?

Take it seriously without assessing it on the spot, avoid promising confidentiality you cannot deliver, remove any continuing risk to the person, write down the conversation the same day, and do not investigate it yourself if it is serious or if it involves you. Speed of response predicts outcomes better than the severity of the incident.

6. What if the Person Bullying Someone in My Team Is My Own Manager?

Escalate outside the reporting line, to HR or to a senior manager who sits outside it, and use the alternative reporting route your policy should provide. Do not attempt to investigate it, and do not raise it with that person on the worker’s behalf without the worker’s agreement, because they carry the consequences. Record that you escalated and when. A worker who reports upward and sees nothing happen generally does not report again.

7. Does an Employer Get in Trouble for What a Supervisor Does?

Generally yes. Employers are usually liable for what managers do in connection with employment. Where a defence exists it typically turns on whether reasonable steps were taken, and most of those steps are things a supervisor did or did not do, so the employer’s position depends heavily on the manager’s conduct and records.

8. Why Should a Supervisor Document Their Response to Workplace Bullying?

Because the matter may surface a year or more later, and undocumented good handling looks the same as no handling. Records of what was said, what was done, and the work reason and manner behind any management action are what support both your employer’s position and your own.

Read More About Workplace Bullying:

• Workplace bullying and conflict: the line, the law and the duty
• 6 considerations for supervisors and managers responding to workplace bullying
• 7 steps to investigate a complaint of workplace bullying
• 10 bullying personality archetypes and how to stop them
• What is psychological abuse in the workplace?