This could tell us that when nurses are overly stressed and under excessive pressure, they become hostile toward the people they most frequently encounter during the workday: other nurses. Indeed, experts say that nurses who are burned out at work “are more likely to vent their frustration by abusing other nurses.” What other outlet do they have? In departments where nurses are rarely afforded the time to eat or go to the bathroom, they certainly wouldn’t be able to go for a walk or step outside to compose themselves. Stuck in their unit for hours on end, they can be so physically and emotionally worn out that they have little left for themselves, let alone each other. Nurses who are too drained or busy to take the time for self-care are more likely to engage in lateral aggression.
This theory could help to explain why bullying is so rampant among healthcare professionals. Not many workplaces are as tense and simultaneously as emotionally and spiritually draining as a hospital. It is evident how the cycle might perpetuate: Multiple studies have found that bullied nurses have much higher levels of burnout than their peers. If these victims, now burnt out, need an outlet themselves, they might be more likely to engage in the same bullying behavior.
Does hazing make nurses stronger?
There may be a reason why nurse bullying commonly targets young, inexperienced, or newly transitioned nurses. It’s arguable that there is a difference between the kinds of workplace bullying that are universal across professions and the type that qualifies as nurses “eating their young.”
Nurses told me that colleagues want a new nurse to prove herself before they accept her as part of the team. “There is a sort of test new nurses need to pass to become part of the nursing clique,” said a California nurse practitioner. Because of the nature of the job, nurses hold one another accountable to strict standards. “Due to the broad base of knowledge we must have, and many of us being ‘Type AAA’ perfectionist personalities, we have very high expectations of our peers,” a Missouri public health nurse said.
As a result, some nurses are short on patience and stingy about sharing knowledge, in order to toughen up new nurses. “Eating their young” refers to “the fact that a new nurse has to earn the right to work in the unit. No one gets any slack for being new,” said a Pennsylvania OR nurse. “You have to jump right in and be able to care for the most difficult patients as if you’ve been doing it a hundred years. Even when I moved to a new facility and had been doing the same job previously, there was this feeling of being tested to see if I would measure up and fit in.”
This philosophy leads some nurses to assign new nurses the most difficult or highest number of patients without assisting them, or to give them a hard time when they don’t know what to do. “Nurses put their own on steep learning curves to test their mettle. It’s sick and often counterproductive,” said a Virginia labor-and-delivery nurse. “Older or very insecure nurses often push the younger ones by giving them too many tasks to complete and not enough support.”
But making someone feel worse about her skills is not the same as making her a better nurse. And sometimes the “testing” goes too far. As I interviewed nurses for this book, many stories sounded similar to those of the college girls I interviewed for Pledged, a book investigating sororities. Like sorority sisters, nurses told me about overbearing cliques, governance by administrators more focused on money and image than on people and substance, arbitrary standards regarding their looks, and, most relevant to this section, a long tradition of hazing and questionable rites of passage.
Nurses eating their young is a form of hazing, different from other types of workplace bullying both within and outside of the nurse profession. It is as if nurses, like sorority members, have to endure a pledge period during which they must prove themselves worthy of a group that has already admitted them. A Texas nursing school professor referred to nurses eating their young as “sorority initiation.” Nurses in other states told me about rituals such as an OR’s tradition of initiating new nurses (most often the young, pretty ones) into the department by dunking them into the scrub sink with the water running.
Even American Nurses Association (ANA) literature called nurse bullying “a type of initiation to determine if the new nurse is tough enough to survive in nursing.” (The ANA added, “But the problem extends beyond the new nurse to include nurses at all levels as potential victims.”) A Florida psychiatric nurse told me, “Older nurses being harsh to newer nurses is almost like a ritual. I think sometimes it’s done subconsciously. We can be harsh to new nurses to make them strong for the many challenges they will face in this profession.”
When a North Carolina nurse started out in the ER, she said the old guard “punished” her for being young and attractive. If every other nurse had zero patients and she had four, her colleagues would assign her a fifth. “The existing nurses had been there for eons and felt they owned the place. They treated new staff however they pleased. I cried on the drive home every day for my first six months,” she said. “I was in the Marine Corps before this, I survived boot camp. [I thought] surely I could take all of the mean, snarky, underhanded hazing. But I wasn’t at that hospital longer than a year because of it.”
An Idaho murse said he was hazed a few years ago partly because he was a new graduate, but mostly because he is male. “I was treated like an idiot for the first several months. They made snide remarks or didn’t value my opinion. Also, as a man, I was expected to act differently in crisis. Starting as a new nurse was terrifying. When someone is actively dying in front of you or having a psychotic episode, it takes some getting used to, regardless of gender,” he said. “When I was giving report, it was as if I were being interrogated by the Gestapo. I’d be asked questions I didn’t know and treated like an idiot for not knowing the answers. I had to earn every ounce of respect that I got. ‘Eating their young’ comes from the need to weed out nurses who don’t belong, but there must be a better way to go about it. My experience was awful.”
Researchers have described how experienced nurses use lateral aggression to keep younger nurses and students in their place. By making the less experienced nurses doubt their ability, they create a perceived hierarchy tiered by seniority. This is not unlike sororities grinding pledges down to rebuild them in the preferred mold. “Here, a select group of senior nurses take any opportunity to tear a nurse down. Entering an ICU, I thought I’d have a great preceptor to teach me everything I’d ever need to know. But I really felt like I was set up for failure,” said a cardiovascular nurse who was hazed repeatedly. “New nurses are inevitably going to make mistakes, but senior nurses feed off it and make it worse. I understand that you need to know your stuff, but those nurses are there to teach you.”
When an inexperienced coworker was assigned to a case that was out of her depth and she was afraid she couldn’t properly serve the patient’s needs, she asked her preceptor and the charge nurse for help. “They left her to drown,” the cardiovascular nurse said. “She broke down in tears in the middle of morning doctor rounds. Unfortunately, I think this will continue, because when new nurses bring this up as bullying or harassment, it gets pushed aside or sounds like tattling.”
Significant numbers of Greek alumni believe their college sorority is more cohesive because they suffered through hazing together; and that because they participated in the hazing tradition, so should every group that follows. Similarly, Boston Medical Center’s Martha Griffin has observed, “Tolerance for some forms of nursing practice lateral violence is seen historically in the context of a rite of passage or expressed in the thought ‘this is how people were to me, when I was learning.’”