Every choice in life comes with a trade-off. You can enjoy the fruits of your choice while paying the cost of the missed opportunity. This is a natural law, much like the logic of Darwinism, in which selection decides what survives and what thrives. Survival is a primitive motivation and instinct in every living thing on this planet, humans included; thus, in whatever we do and wherever we live, we tend to do our best to adapt and survive. The species that survive are naturally selected because of their survival mechanisms. Yet even as survival remains the basis, thriving represents the next level of motivation, one that prepares a species to live in harmony. In the workplace, this same logic plays out in human terms, and, left unchecked, it runs counter to the spirit of SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), which calls for safe, secure, and supportive working environments, the kind of conditions incompatible with psychological harm and loss of dignity.
Survival and thriving are two motivations on a spectrum, where an increase in one naturally leads to a decrease in the other, since both draw on the same finite psychological and material resources. When you need to fight for survival, thriving takes a back seat; conversely, when you're thriving and striving to excel, there's no need to fight merely to survive. Modern-day organizations aiming to build harmony should cultivate a thriving motivation among their employees, one in which survival is no longer a concern. In this sense, a workplace's climate and culture can either leave employees to merely survive or build them up to thrive. The latter are the positive workplaces, where harmony and peace exist without struggle. This dynamic plays out at three levels, and it's worth looking at each in turn: the organizational level, where cultures enable bullying to take root; the interpersonal level, where bystanders, through action or inaction, decide whether a culture of silence deepens or breaks; and the individual level, where targets, even when trapped inside such a system, retain the one power that can't fully be taken from them: the power to choose.
At the organizational level, toxic workplaces foster survival rather than thriving, sustaining this survival mode through recurring instances of workplace mistreatment such as incivility and bullying. When organizations normalize severe negative acts like workplace bullying, situations that should demand immediate attention instead become ordinary. Studies have shown that certain elements embedded in organizational culture enable bullying in the workplace. For instance, low perceived costs of bullying, power imbalances, rewarding unhealthy internal competition, and triggering situations like downsizing can act as enabling structures for bullying.
Another prominent factor enabling bullying is leadership style: leaders who practice authoritarian or abusive supervision styles create a power imbalance within the organization and a fertile ground for bullying by silencing employees through the abuse of power. Poor role clarity and weak accountability structures are also organizational-level risk factors—when responsibilities and reporting lines are unclear, bullying can occur because no one is clearly responsible for intervening. This list of factors is not exhaustive; nonetheless, every organization should conduct a self-assessment to determine whether it knowingly or unknowingly facilitates workplace bullying.
At the interpersonal level, bystander inaction significantly contributes to organizations being pushed into survival mode. Most people refrain from getting involved in workplace politics and negative workplace dynamics for fear of retaliation—they worry that speaking up could make them the next target. This fear is what makes whistleblowing so demanding: it requires the courage to make authorities and powerful individuals confront their own abusive behavior or their own inaction in the face of it, knowing the messenger may pay the price. This fear helps explain a pattern reported across many studies: targets tend to receive only passive support from their colleagues. The gap becomes especially visible when colleagues are asked directly whether they would stand up for the targeted person—in the abstract, they imagine themselves as heroes stepping in to help someone in need. In practice, though, that self-image rarely translates into action. Bystanders often assume someone else will intervene, or they take cues from others' inaction and conclude that silence is the safer path. This pattern is what researchers call the bystander effect: silence driven by diffusion of responsibility, fear of misjudging the situation, or social influence.
The dynamic can go further still. Some studies demonstrate that bystanders don't just withhold support; they actively side with the bully, particularly when the bully holds a position of power. Taken together, these active and passive, constructive and destructive bystander behaviors make bullying dynamics far more complex than a simple bully-target relationship, and they carry real consequences for targets' psychosocial well-being and for whether bullying is ultimately promoted or inhibited in the workplace. This is why silently witnessing such behavior is never a neutral act; it is, in effect, a politicized stance in favor of the mistreatment. That silence doesn't just reflect the culture; it actively builds a culture of silence.
At the individual level, do targets have choices while they face bullying? Most often, in bullying, there are situations where people are forcibly placed into systems with no room for escape. In such places, the rule of Darwinism shouldn't apply, because the issue at stake is not survival but harmony and peace. In a position of powerlessness, the choices available to a target are rarely the kind that resolve the situation; they are narrower, harder, and often costly, no matter which one is taken. Yet even in such difficult circumstances, empowerment isn't about thriving; it's about finding the right choice. Having a choice at all is itself empowering, even when that choice does nothing to undo the injustice of being placed in an inescapable system in the first place. To be stripped of every choice is to be stripped of selfhood itself; to retain even one, however limited, is to remain a person acting in the world rather than a situation merely happening to someone. As celebrated American author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou put it, we can choose not to be reduced by what happens to us.
Survival and thriving, then, are not just individual instincts; they are shaped by the systems we build and the silences we keep. An organization's culture decides whether its people are left to merely survive or given room to thrive; bystanders decide, through action or inaction, whether that culture of silence deepens or breaks; and targets, even when stripped of nearly everything else, retain the one thing that cannot fully be taken from them, the capacity to choose. None of these choices is equal, and none of them is easy. But they exist at every level of this dynamic for the organization choosing what kind of culture to build, for the bystander choosing whether to look away, and for the target choosing how to respond to what they cannot control. We all have choices. The work for organizations, bystanders, and targets alike is to choose wisely.
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