Power Harassment at Work: How to Identify, Prevent and Respond

What Power Harassment Is

Power harassment is harassment where the person doing it holds authority over the person receiving it.

A supervisor, a manager, a team leader, a shift coordinator, a partner in a firm, or anyone who controls another worker’s roster, pay, progression, references or day-to-day tasks.

The conduct that makes up power harassment is often unremarkable on paper.

What makes power harassment distinct is that the ordinary defences are gone.

The target cannot walk away from the conversation, cannot decline the request, and cannot report it without going through, or around, the person doing it. That asymmetry is the harm.

It also runs in the other direction more often than people expect. A long-tenured team can make a new manager’s job impossible through coordinated obstruction and undermining. That is upward power harassment, and the same law applies.

Why Australian Law Does Not Use the Term

“Power harassment” is a translation of a term used in Japanese workplace law and it has spread through international HR writing.

No Australian statute uses it. If a worker walks into the Fair Work Commission and asks to make a power harassment claim, the matter will be dealt with as something else.

That does not make power harassment a useless idea. It describes a real dynamic that Australian law addresses through several doors at once, and knowing which door applies is what determines what a worker can actually do.

The Line Between Firm Management and Abuse of Authority

Where does firm management end and power harassment begin? This is the question every manager and every HR team actually has, and it is where most power harassment complaints are won or lost.

Australian law is deliberately clear that managing people is not bullying. Setting expectations, giving critical feedback, running a performance process, investigating misconduct, imposing discipline and restructuring a team are all things an employer is entitled to do, and a worker finding them unwelcome does not change that.

What moves conduct across the line into power harassment is not the decision itself. It is the way the decision is made and delivered.

Reasonable Management Action: The Three-Part Test

Under section 789FD(2) of the Fair Work Act, a worker is not bullied at work if the conduct was reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner. Three things all have to be true.

1. It has to be management action: The conduct must relate to directing, controlling or managing workers or work performance. Personal hostility dressed up as supervision does not qualify.
2. The action has to be reasonable: Assessed objectively against accepted standards of business management, not against the manager’s own view of it.
3. The manner has to be reasonable: Was it communicated clearly and respectfully, was a proper process followed, did the worker get a fair opportunity to respond, was it proportionate.

All three must be satisfied before conduct is excluded from being bullying, and by extension from the power harassment complaints this article covers.

A performance conversation that was entirely justified on the merits can still fall outside the exclusion because of how it was conducted, and that is the failure mode most organisations walk into.

Intent is not part of the test. The Commission looks at the nature and effect of the conduct, not whether the manager meant to cause harm.

“I was only trying to lift standards” answers a question nobody asked.

How to Identify Power Harassment

Using Authority Over Work

• Impossible deadlines or volumes assigned to one person
• Removing responsibilities, information or access without explanation
• Rostering used as reward and punishment
• Blocking leave, training or development for one worker
• Taking credit for a worker’s output, or attributing failures to them

Using Authority Over the Person

• Shouting, belittling, or criticism delivered in front of others
• Constant fault-finding on trivia while the substantive work is ignored
• Comments about job security used to secure compliance
• Excluding someone from meetings, decisions or communications they need
• Personal remarks framed as feedback

Using Authority Over the Process

• Discouraging or delaying a complaint, or handling one they are implicated in
• Warnings issued without particulars or a chance to answer
• Retaliation after a report: worse shifts, closer scrutiny, a colder file
• Pressure to sign, agree or resign without time to consider or get advice

Retaliation deserves separate emphasis, because it is the form of power harassment that does the most damage.

Where a complaint concerned a protected attribute or a workplace right, retaliating against the complainant is unlawful in its own right, and it frequently causes more damage than the conduct complained of.

The Law: Which Duties Apply

Power harassment sits across the same four frameworks as the rest of the harassment series, and more than one usually applies to the same facts.

Under the Fair Work Act, workplace bullying is defined in section 789FD(1) as an individual or group repeatedly behaving unreasonably towards a worker or group of workers at work, where the behaviour creates a risk to health and safety. Repetition is required. The worker does not need to show actual harm, only a risk to health and safety.

Under work health and safety law, bullying, harassment, discrimination, aggression and violence are psychosocial hazards. A PCBU must eliminate or minimise the risk so far as is reasonably practicable. This duty applies whether or not the conduct is repeated, which is why a single serious incident still requires a response.

Under anti-discrimination law, if the conduct targets a protected attribute it is discriminatory harassment as well, with its own avenues and its own liability rules.

Under the Sex Discrimination Act, if the conduct is sexual or sex-based, the positive duty in section 47C applies, requiring proactive elimination rather than a response after a complaint. The Australian Human Rights Commission has been able to enforce that duty since 12 December 2023.

For the attribute-based dimension, see our guide to discriminatory harassment. For the pattern and effects of sustained mistreatment, see psychological harassment.

What the Fair Work Commission Can and Cannot Do

Workers and managers both misunderstand what the Commission can do about power harassment, and the misunderstanding shapes behaviour on both sides.

A worker in a constitutionally covered business can apply for an order to stop bullying.

The Commission must be satisfied that there was repeated unreasonable behaviour, that it created a risk to health and safety, and that the conduct was not reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner.

The Commission can make any order it considers appropriate to prevent the worker being bullied at work. In practice that means orders about conduct, contact, supervision arrangements and process.

The Commission cannot award compensation on a stop bullying application, and it will not make an order where there is no ongoing risk, for example because the worker or the manager has already left.

Two consequences follow. Workers who want compensation take a different route, typically general protections, a discrimination claim or workers compensation.

And an organisation that hopes a resignation ends the matter is often wrong, because the alternative routes remain open after the stop bullying route closes.

What the Data Shows

Harassment and bullying, which is where power harassment lands in the data, cause more mental stress claims in Australia than work pressure does.

That is worth sitting with, because most organisations manage workload deliberately and manage conduct only when someone complains.

The decade trend is the other signal. Mental health conditions are up 161% on ten years ago while the overall claim picture has not moved anything like that far.

Whatever your organisation is carrying here, it is getting more expensive.

Why Power Harassment Stays Hidden Longest

Every form of harassment is under-reported. Power harassment is the worst of them, for reasons that are structural rather than cultural.

• The reporting path runs through the problem: Where the manager is the respondent, a policy that says “raise it with your manager” is a closed door.
• The consequences are concrete: Rosters, references, probation and promotion are all in the same hands.
• It is hard to name: Individually each act looks like management. The pattern is the harm, and patterns take months to see.
• High performers get latitude: Organisations tolerate conduct from people who deliver, and everyone notices.
• Workers pre-judge themselves: Many decide their complaint would be dismissed as poor performance, so they leave instead. Exit interviews are where this surfaces.

How to Prevent Power Harassment

1. Give People a Reporting Path That Bypasses the Line

This is the single most effective control against power harassment. Name an alternative contact in the policy and make sure they are not the respondent’s peer or friend. This single control does more for power harassment than any other.

2. Train Managers on the Line, Not Just on the Rule

Managers do not need to be told bullying is wrong.

They need to know that reasonable management action fails the test when the manner is unreasonable, and what that looks like in a real performance conversation.

Sentrient’s workplace bullying training for managers and supervisors is built for that, with the workplace bullying course for all workers and respect at work training setting the baseline.

3. Require Process on the Decisions Where Power Harassment Lives

Performance management, discipline, rostering and promotion should leave a record showing what was decided, why, and that the worker was heard. Process protects good managers as much as it constrains bad ones.

4. Put It on the Psychosocial Risk Register

Safe Work Australia names bullying and harassment among the psychosocial hazards a PCBU must manage. Our guide to psychosocial risk management sets out how to run it as a hazard rather than a HR issue.

5. Read Your Own Data by Team

Power harassment shows up in operational data before it shows up in a complaint. Turnover, absence, leave patterns, engagement comments and exit interviews concentrated under one manager tell you something a complaints register will not.

6. Apply the Standard to Everyone

The most common failure is not ignorance of the rule. It is exempting the people who bring in the revenue.

How to Respond When the Respondent Is a Manager

1. Take it out of their line immediately: The respondent must not receive, handle, or be briefed on the complaint before the process is set.
2. Record it in the worker’s words: Ask for dates, examples and witnesses. A pattern needs particulars.
3. Ask about the workload and the process, not just the tone: Power harassment usually lives in allocation, rostering and access rather than in what was said.
4. Test the conduct against the three-part test: Was it management action, was the action reasonable, was the manner reasonable. Answer them separately.
5. Get the comparison: How were other team members managed over the same period. Consistency usually decides it.
6. Use an independent investigator where seniority makes impartiality doubtful: If the respondent outranks everyone available, go external.
7. Protect against retaliation, and be seen to: Check in during and after, and make clear that retaliation is a separate matter with separate consequences.
8. Fix the conditions that produced the power harassment: If the manager was under-trained, over-stretched or rewarded for output alone, discipline alone will not stop the next one.

Workers can also go outside the organisation, and should not be discouraged from it: the Fair Work Commission for a stop bullying order, the Australian Human Rights Commission or a state or territory body where a protected attribute is involved, and the WHS regulator where psychosocial risk is not being managed.

Australian complaints go to Australian bodies. Time limits apply, so early advice from a union, a community legal centre or a lawyer is worthwhile.

Where to Start

Open your bullying or behaviour policy and find the sentence about power harassment, or rather, find the sentence that tells a worker who to contact. If the only answer is their manager, you have no reporting path for the most common form of power harassment there is.

Then look at turnover and absence by team over the last two years. The pattern is usually already in your data, waiting for someone to read it by manager rather than by department.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What Is Power Harassment at Work?

Power harassment is harassment by someone with authority over the target, such as a supervisor or manager, where that authority makes the conduct hard to refuse, report or escape. It also covers coordinated undermining of a manager by their own team.

2. Is Power Harassment Illegal in Australia?

The phrase is not used in Australian law, but the conduct is covered. Where it is repeated and creates a risk to health and safety it is workplace bullying under the Fair Work Act. It may also be discriminatory or sexual harassment, a general protections matter, and a breach of your work health and safety duty to manage psychosocial risk.

3. Is My Manager Bullying Me or Just Managing Me?

Reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is not bullying. Three things must all be true for that exclusion to apply: the conduct is genuinely management action, the action is objectively reasonable, and the manner of carrying it out is reasonable. A justified performance process can still fall outside the exclusion if the manner was unreasonable.

4. Does Power Harassment Have to Be Repeated?

For a Fair Work stop bullying order, yes, the behaviour must be repeated. But your work health and safety duty and, where relevant, anti-discrimination law can be engaged by a single incident, so a one-off still requires a response.

5. Can the Fair Work Commission Award Compensation?

Not on a stop bullying application. The Commission can make any order it considers appropriate to prevent the worker being bullied, but it cannot award compensation and will not make an order where there is no ongoing risk. Compensation is pursued through other avenues.

6. Does It Count If My Manager Did Not Mean Any Harm?

Yes. Intent is not part of the test. The focus is on the nature and effect of the conduct rather than whether the person intended to cause harm.

7. Can a Manager Be Bullied by Their Own Team?

Yes. Upward bullying is covered by the same definition. Coordinated obstruction, undermining and refusal to cooperate can all be repeated unreasonable behaviour creating a risk to health and safety.

8. Who Should Handle a Complaint About a Senior Manager?

Someone outside their reporting line, and outside their influence. Where seniority makes internal impartiality doubtful, use an external investigator. The respondent must not receive or be briefed on the complaint before the process is set.

Read More About Workplace Harassment:

• The 12 most common types of workplace harassment in Australia
• How to identify, prevent and respond to psychological harassment in the workplace
• How to identify, prevent and respond to discriminatory harassment in the workplace
• What is bullying and what is conflict in the workplace
• 6 considerations for supervisors and managers when responding to workplace bullying
• 7 steps to investigate a complaint of workplace bullying