Their overall well-being is worse, they are more stressed, angry, anxious, less committed and more likely to quit, a study showed.

"Bullying can be done in such an insidious way that unless you are the victim, other people don't even know its happening," Sandy Hershcovis, of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, said in an interview.

"It's really hard to get other people to understand or to try to report it."

Herschcovis and Julian Barling, of Ontario's Queens University, reviewed 110 studies conducted over 21 years that compared outcomes of workers dealing with sexual harassment and workplace aggression. They will present the findings at a conference co-hosted by the American Psychological Association.

They studied the effects of workplace bullying and sexual harassment such as job satisfaction and also examined work stress and physical, psychological and emotional well-being.

"In all cases both sexual harassment and workplace aggression had relationships with these outcomes but workplace aggression or bullying had the stronger effect over sexual harassment," Hershcovis said.

The study defined workplace aggression as incivility, including rudeness and discourteous verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Bullying behaviours included yelling, repeatedly reminding employees of mistakes, spreading gossip and lies, ignoring or excluding workers and insulting habits, attitudes or a person's private life.

Interpersonal conflict included hostile behaviour, verbal aggression and angry exchanges.

Hershcovis said while there are still challenges for victims of sexual harassment, they do have recourse. They can report the abuse, go to their union or take legal action.

"Workplace bullying... doesn't have any policy attention, there is no legal recourse you can take, so really you are stuck and there is no coping mechanism that you can try to use to overcome the situation," she explained.

Hershcovis said governments should follow those in Quebec, Canada and in Scandinavian countries and create workplace aggression legislation. She said training co-workers to recognise and "put their foot down" against bullying as they do in schools is likely to be more effective than company policies.

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