Workplace Bullying vs Conflict: The Line, The Law And The Duty

What Workplace Bullying Is Under Australian Law

Australian law gives workplace bullying a specific definition, and it is narrower than the everyday use of the word.

Section 789FD of the Fair Work Act 2009 says a worker is bullied at work when an individual or a group of individuals repeatedly behaves unreasonably towards them, and that behaviour creates a risk to health and safety.

Both elements have to be present.

• Repeatedly: A pattern, not an event. It does not have to be the same behaviour each time, and the incidents do not have to be close together. What matters is that there is more than one
• Unreasonably: Behaviour a reasonable person, having regard to the circumstances, would see as unreasonable. This is judged objectively, from outside, not from inside the head of the person doing it
• Creates a risk to health and safety: A risk, not an injury. Nobody has to have broken down, taken leave or made a claim for the test to be met

Workplace bullying commonly looks like persistent criticism that never lands on anything fixable, exclusion from meetings and information the person needs, work assigned or withdrawn to make someone look incompetent, impossible deadlines set only for one person, spreading information about someone, threats about job security, and practical jokes aimed repeatedly at the same target.

Behaviour delivered by message, email or group chat counts. Behaviour that happens at a work function, on a work trip or in a work chat outside hours counts.

Some conduct is worse than bullying rather than a version of it.

Physical violence, threats of violence and sexual assault are criminal matters and should be treated that way from the first minute.

Sexual harassment has its own prohibition and, unlike bullying, does not need to be repeated.

What Workplace Conflict Is, and Why Conflict Is Not Bullying

Conflict is a clash of interests. Two people, or two teams, want different things, or want the same thing and cannot both have it.

It shows up over priorities, resources, methods, values and credit, and it is a normal feature of any workplace where people care about the outcome.

Conflict is not a failure of culture. A workplace with no visible disagreement is usually not harmonious, it is a workplace where people have learned not to raise things.

The structural difference is power. In conflict, both people can still push back, walk away, escalate, or state their case and be heard.

In workplace bullying there is a power imbalance, formal or informal, that makes the target unable to do those things.

That imbalance is why the same words can be an argument between two peers and bullying when they come from a supervisor to a graduate.

Conflict that is handled badly does not stay conflict. It hardens into a pattern aimed at a person rather than a problem, and at that point it has become workplace bullying regardless of how it started.

Workplace Bullying vs Conflict: The Practical Test

Managers rarely need the statutory test in the moment. They need to know which of the two things is sitting in front of them, because the response is completely different. Conflict is resolved. Workplace bullying is stopped.

Intention Is Not Part of the Workplace Bullying Test

This is the point organisations most often get wrong, and it is worth stating plainly because it changes how complaints are assessed.

Section 789FD contains no intention element. The behaviour has to be repeated, unreasonable and create a risk to health and safety.

It does not have to be deliberate, and the person doing it does not have to know they are doing it.

Unreasonableness is judged objectively, by what a reasonable person would think looking at the circumstances, not by what the person meant.

So “that was never my intention” is not a defence, and it is not a finding.

A manager who genuinely believes they are driving performance, and who would be appalled to be called a bully, can still be bullying someone within the meaning of the Act.

The practical consequence for anyone assessing a complaint: do not begin by asking whether the person meant it.

Begin by asking what happened, how often, and whether a reasonable person would call it unreasonable.

Intention may matter later, when you decide what consequence is proportionate. It does not decide whether workplace bullying occurred.

Reasonable Management Action, the Exclusion That Decides Most Workplace Bullying Cases

Section 789FD(2) says reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is not workplace bullying.

This is the provision that most complaints turn on, and it has three parts that all have to hold.

• It has to be management action: Performance management, allocating work, setting standards, investigating misconduct, restructuring, refusing a request, or discipline. Freezing someone out of a project is not management action, it is just conduct
• The action has to be reasonable: There has to be a genuine work reason, and it has to be proportionate
• It has to be carried out in a reasonable manner: This is where organisations fail. Reasonable performance management delivered by shouting at someone in an open plan office, or by email at 11pm, or without ever telling them what the concern is, stops being protected

Managers hear the first two parts and stop listening. The exclusion protects the decision, not the delivery.

A perfectly justified performance process run badly enough can be workplace bullying, and that is not a technicality, it is the whole point of the third limb.

The behavioural side of this, what abusive conduct dressed as management actually looks like day to day, is covered in our guide to psychological abuse in the workplace. This section is about the legal test rather than the behaviour catalogue.

Two consequences worth building into your process.

Managers need to be able to show a work reason for what they did, contemporaneously rather than reconstructed afterwards.

And the manner needs to be documented too, not just the decision, because the manner is what gets tested.

A Single Incident Is Not Workplace Bullying, but It Can Still Breach Your Duty

Because the Fair Work Act test requires repetition, one incident is not workplace bullying under that Act, however serious it was.

Organisations draw exactly the wrong conclusion from this.

They treat the first incident as something that cannot be actioned, and wait to see whether it happens again.

By the time it is repeated, the pattern is established, the target has usually disengaged, and the record shows the organisation knew about the first one and did nothing.

The work health and safety duty has no repetition requirement.

A single serious incident is a psychosocial hazard the moment it occurs, and your duty to manage it engages immediately.

Sexual harassment likewise does not need to be repeated. Neither does occupational violence and aggression.

The correct response to a first incident is to act on it, record it, and make the standard visible. That is also, incidentally, the best protection you have if it does become a pattern.

Who Is Protected From Workplace Bullying, and Who Is Left Out

The protection is broader than employees. Under the Fair Work Act the worker categories include employees on any contract type, contractors and subcontractors, outworkers, apprentices, trainees, interns, work experience students and some volunteers.

But there is a limitation almost nobody tells employers about, and it catches a lot of Australian workplaces.

The stop bullying jurisdiction only reaches workers in a constitutionally covered business.

That means a constitutional corporation, the Commonwealth or a Commonwealth authority, a body corporate incorporated in a Territory, or a business operating principally in a Territory or a Commonwealth place.

Which means these workers generally cannot use it at all:

• State government employees
• Most local government employees, unless the council trades substantially
• Employees of sole traders and most partnerships, because there is no corporation
• Wholly volunteer associations with no employees

That is a large slice of the Australian workforce with no access to the remedy people assume exists.

Those workers still have state work health and safety law, state anti-discrimination law where an attribute is involved, and in some states a dedicated workplace complaints route.

But if your organisation sits in one of those categories, telling your people that they can go to the Fair Work Commission is not accurate, and your internal process is doing more work than you realise.

What the Fair Work Commission Can and Cannot Do About Workplace Bullying

When an employer or a worker thinks about the law on workplace bullying, this is usually what they picture.

It is worth understanding what the jurisdiction actually delivers.

The Commission can make an order to stop bullying. It can direct an individual to stop specified behaviour, direct changes to how work is organised, require a policy to be reviewed or followed, and require training or monitoring.

Here is what it cannot do.

• It cannot award compensation: No money. Orders are preventative, not remedial. A worker seeking compensation is in the wrong jurisdiction and often finds that out late
• It cannot act where there is no risk of the bullying continuing: If the worker has resigned, or the person complained about has gone, there is nothing to prevent and the application fails, however well founded the complaint was
• It cannot punish anyone: An order is not a finding of misconduct and carries no penalty in itself

Then there is the volume. When the jurisdiction started it was expected to receive up to 3,500 applications a year.

In its first fifteen months it received 874 and made four orders.

A representative quarter looked like this: 149 applications lodged, 137 withdrawn or resolved before final determination, 12 reaching determination, 11 of those dismissed, and one order made.

Read that carefully, because it is easy to misread as a sign that workplace bullying is rare. It is not.

It is a sign that most matters settle or evaporate before anyone decides them, that the bar for an order is high, and that the remedy on offer does not match what most complainants actually want, which is usually acknowledgement and compensation for what happened.

Why the Work Health and Safety Duty Matters More Than the Bullying Jurisdiction

The Fair Work route is the one people know about. The work health and safety duty is the one that actually binds you, and it is broader in every direction that matters.

Workplace bullying is a named psychosocial hazard in every Australian jurisdiction, and the psychosocial regulations now require it to be managed the same way a physical hazard is.

That means it belongs on your risk register with named controls and review dates, not only in your HR complaints process.

Victoria’s psychological health regulations have been in force since 1 December 2025 and the other jurisdictions have equivalent psychosocial duties.

How Common Workplace Bullying Is in Australia, and Who Does It

Australian research on workplace bullying gives two consistent findings, and both are uncomfortable for the way most organisations run their process.

Bully Zero’s 2025 national research found 71% of Australians have experienced bullying at some point, 31% within the past year, and 27% in the workplace.

Only 16% of those bullied had anyone step in. On policies, 42% said management had told them about an anti-bullying policy, 25% said a policy existed but was not enforced, and 23% were not aware of one at all.

The Australian Workplace Barometer, surveying 4,242 workers, put the national workplace bullying rate at 9.6%, up from 7.0% in the earlier wave.

Its most useful finding is about the source: the person doing the bullying was a supervisor in 62.3% of cases and a co-worker in 28.0%.

It also found nearly half of bullying lasts more than six months, and 16.3% goes on for more than two years.

Insurer data points the same way on trajectory. Allianz Australia has reported psychological injury claims linked to bullying rising more than 75% in a year, with bullying accounting for a substantial share of active psychological claims.

Three things follow from that.

• Your bullying problem is most likely a management behaviour problem: If the supervisor is the source in roughly six cases out of ten, then manager capability, not employee awareness, is where the control belongs
• A complaints process alone will not find it: Bullying that runs for six months to two years before anything happens is not being surfaced by the channel you have
• An unenforced policy is worse than a visible gap: A quarter of people said their organisation had a policy that was not enforced. That teaches the workforce something quite specific about what the standard is worth

The Barometer figures come from an earlier survey wave and should be read as a pattern rather than a current measurement.

The direction they point has not changed.

The Effects of Workplace Bullying on People and Organisations

The harm is documented and it is not confined to the person being targeted.

For the individual: stress, fear, anxiety and depression; loss of confidence and of the ability to do work they were previously good at; sleep problems, headaches and physical symptoms including musculoskeletal complaints; withdrawal from colleagues; and effects that follow them home into relationships and family life.

Workplace bullying is a leading contributor to psychological injury claims, and those claims run longer and cost more than physical injury claims.

For the team: people who witness workplace bullying and see nothing done conclude that the standard is not real.

Productivity falls across the group, not just for the target. Discretionary effort disappears first.

For the organisation: turnover, recruitment cost, absence, workers compensation premiums, the cost of investigations, legal exposure across several jurisdictions at once, and reputational damage that now travels through review sites and professional networks.

The mistrust in management that follows a mishandled case tends to outlast everyone involved in it.

How Conflict Escalates Into Workplace Bullying, and Where to Intervene

Most workplace bullying does not begin as bullying. It begins as an unresolved disagreement, and it escalates through recognisable stages.

Knowing them tells you where intervention is cheap and where it stops being possible.

• Stage one, the issue: A genuine disagreement about work. Cheap to resolve. Almost always ignored because it looks like normal friction
• Stage two, the person: The disagreement stops being about the decision and starts being about the individual. The tone changes. This is the last point at which a conversation still fixes it
• Stage three, the pattern: Behaviour becomes repeated and one-directional. Others notice and adjust around it. By now it meets the statutory test
• Stage four, the exit: The target takes leave, disengages or resigns. The organisation usually learns the full history at this point, from a claim or an exit interview

Organisations intervene at stage three or four, and by then the options are formal, expensive and damaging to everyone.

The whole value of teaching managers the conflict and bullying distinction is that it lets them act at stage two, where a direct conversation still works and no process is needed.

What Employers and HR Must Do About Workplace Bullying

Six things, in the order they matter.

• Treat workplace bullying as a work health and safety hazard, not only as a conduct issue: Put it on the risk register with named controls, an owner and a review date. This is what the psychosocial regulations require and it is what a regulator asks to see
• Write a policy that says what will happen, not only what is unacceptable: It should define bullying using the statutory test, explain reasonable management action so managers are not afraid to manage, name the reporting routes including one that bypasses the person’s own manager, and state the timeframes. Then enforce it, because an unenforced policy is a liability rather than a control
• Train managers specifically and separately: They are the source in the majority of cases and the detection point in almost all of them. They need the three part reasonable management action test, the fact that intention is not a defence, and permission to act at stage two
• Give people more than one way to report, and respond to the first report: Speed of response predicts outcomes better than the severity of the incident. Record what you did, including for matters resolved informally
• Separate conflict from bullying at intake, and never mediate bullying: Use the question in the box above. Mediation for a one-way pattern harms the person it is meant to help
• Support the person, and do not make the complaint their problem to carry: No victim-blaming, no suggestion they were too sensitive, no informal pressure to let it go. Protect them from retaliation explicitly, because retaliation after a complaint is separately unlawful under the Fair Work Act general protections

Everyone in the organisation has a part in this, not just HR.

A worker who sees workplace bullying and says nothing leaves the target isolated, and bystander silence is one of the strongest predictors that behaviour will continue.

Officers and managers also carry personal duties, and an organisation can be vicariously liable for what its managers do.

Once a complaint is formal, the process itself has to be defensible.

Our guide to investigating a complaint of workplace bullying sets out the seven steps, and the duty of a supervisor and manager covers what sits personally with the people running your teams.

Workplace Bullying Training and Making the Standard Real

Training is where the standard becomes something people can actually apply, and it works best when it is split by audience.

All staff need to know what workplace bullying is, that repeated is the test and intention is not, that reasonable management action is not bullying, how to report, and what being an active bystander looks like.

Managers and supervisors need considerably more: the three part exclusion test, how to run performance management that stays inside it, how to respond in the first 24 hours, and when a matter has to leave their hands.

Sentrient’s workplace bullying course covers the all-staff standard, and preventing and responding to workplace bullying for supervisors and managers carries the manager obligations.

Where the behaviour crosses into disrespect more broadly, respect at work training sets the wider standard.

Training on its own is not a control, though. A workplace compliance system is what turns it into evidence: who completed the training and when, who acknowledged the policy, what was reported, what was done about it, and when the controls were last reviewed.

That record is what a regulator, a commission or an insurer asks for, and it is the part organisations almost never have ready.

Frequently Asked Questions About Workplace Bullying and Conflict

1. What Is the Difference Between Workplace Bullying and Conflict?

Conflict is a two-way disagreement about an issue between people on roughly equal ground, and it can usually be resolved between them. Workplace bullying is repeated unreasonable behaviour directed one way at a person, involving a power imbalance, that creates a risk to health and safety. The clearest test is whether the two people could sit down and sort it out. If one of them would not be safe or able to speak freely, it is bullying, not conflict.

2. Is a Single Incident Workplace Bullying?

Not under the Fair Work Act, which requires repeated behaviour. But a single incident can still breach your work health and safety duty, which has no repetition requirement, and sexual harassment and occupational violence do not need to be repeated either. Waiting for a second incident before acting is a mistake that shows up badly in the record later.

3. Does Workplace Bullying Have to Be Intentional?

No. Section 789FD contains no intention element. Behaviour is assessed objectively against what a reasonable person would consider unreasonable, so a manager can bully someone without meaning to. “That was not my intention” is not a defence, though it may be relevant later when deciding a proportionate consequence.

4. What Is Reasonable Management Action?

Section 789FD(2) says reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is not workplace bullying. All three parts must hold: it must genuinely be management action such as performance management or allocating work, the action must be reasonable, and the way it was carried out must also be reasonable. Justified performance management delivered by shouting or by ambush loses the protection.

5. Can the Fair Work Commission Award Compensation for Workplace Bullying?

No. The Commission can make orders to stop bullying, which are preventative, but it cannot order the payment of money. It also cannot make an order where there is no risk of the bullying continuing, so an application generally fails if the worker has already left. Workers seeking compensation are usually looking at workers compensation or a general protections claim instead.

6. Who Can Apply for a Stop Bullying Order?

Workers including employees, contractors, subcontractors, outworkers, apprentices, trainees, interns, work experience students and some volunteers, but only where they work for a constitutionally covered business. That excludes state government employees, most local government employees and employees of sole traders and most partnerships. Those workers rely on work health and safety law and state-based routes instead.

7. Who Is Most Likely to Be the Source of Workplace Bullying?

Australian survey evidence points to supervisors. The Australian Workplace Barometer found the person bullying was a supervisor in 62.3% of cases and a co-worker in 28.0%. That is why manager training and manager accountability tend to reduce bullying more than general awareness campaigns do.

8. Should Workplace Bullying Be Dealt With by Mediation?

No. Mediation is designed for two-way conflict between parties who can both advocate for themselves. Bullying is a one-way pattern with a power imbalance, so mediation puts the burden of resolution on the person being harmed and can expose them to further harm. Use mediation for conflict, and a proper response process for bullying.

Read More About Workplace Bullying:

• 7 steps to investigate a complaint of workplace bullying
• The duty of a supervisor and manager to eliminate workplace bullying
• 10 bullying personality archetypes and how to stop them
• Don’t be a workplace bullying bystander: identify the signs and act
• What is psychological abuse in the workplace?
• How to identify, prevent and respond to psychological harassment
• The common types of harassment at work