At the faintest whiff of bullying in the workplace, a company needs to crack down on the problem before it erodes employee morale, retards staff productivity, undermines the organization’s values and triggers a lawsuit.

That’s the advice Jennifer Bouman-Steagall, an employment law defense attorney, gave a roomful of business leaders during a luncheon at Buoy Beer Co. on Wednesday. Presented by Lower Columbia Human Resources Management Association, her talk, “Workplace Bullies: Control Them Before They Destroy You!,” examined the many forms that workplace bullying can take, and how it can hurt employee performance and the company’s bottom line.

An Oregon bill (which died in committee during the last session) seeking to legally prohibit workplace bullying defined the practice as “any persistent verbal or physical act of an employer or employee, unrelated to the employer’s legitimate business interests, that a reasonable person would find threatening, intimidating, humiliating, hostile or offensive.”

Bullying can occur between a superior and a subordinate, between co-workers, and among groups of employees targeting individuals.

It can be overt: power tripping, throwing tantrums, dominating conversations and excessively criticizing. And it can be rather covert, like stealing credit for colleague’s ideas, spreading malicious gossip to undermine their reputations and advocating for the needs of one department at the expense of other departments.

Bullying can even be a product of the workplace itself, fostered by the cutthroat nature of the business. Some sales industries, for example, seem to actively encourage bullying behavior among employees plagued by job insecurity.

“Anytime there’s competition — anytime there’s a reward for the top dog — you’re going to see bullies,” Bouman-Steagall said.

If companies don’t take steps to address bullying before it gets out of hand — either by disciplining or terminating the problematic employee — workers can lose trust in their managers and become less emotionally invested in the company’s success.

“If I don’t trust you, I’m not going to give you my extra effort, because I can’t count on you, so it’s not worth it to me,” she said, adding that disillusioned and disgruntled employees quickly learn they can put in partial effort and still get 100 percent of their paycheck.

Though workplace bullying is not illegal per se, it can lead to litigation when it crosses the (often blurry) line into illegal harassment. This happens when the bully appears to target someone because the victim is of a certain age, race, gender, religion or other class protected under anti-discrimination laws.

Bouman-Steagall said that when managers allow bullies to run amok, they sometimes chalk up the dysfunctional work environment to personality clashes and the hypersensitivity of thin-skinned employees. They dismiss the bullying as joking or as harmless “locker room” behavior, unaware that the bullying has become a legal liability.

Then the company gets sued, and the ex-employee’s attorney may look for a possible connection between the pattern of incessant bullying and straight-up ageism, racism or sexism. In the context of a hostile work environment, something as simple as male employee calling a female co-worker a “bitch” (an inherently gendered insult) can move a jury from viewing the case as an instance of bullying to one of illegal harassment.

“It doesn’t take much,” Bouman-Steagall said. “In my experience, the volcano of evidence that I see is bullying behavior that managers didn’t do anything about because it didn’t have anything to do with protected class at the time. And they just thought, ‘Hey, why can’t people just get along?’”

Situations in which the bully is an owner who answers to no one can present a singular challenge for aggrieved workers.

“Sometimes there isn’t a lot we can do. We can give them information. We can show them how their behavior is impacting employee morale. We can show them how it’s impacting the perception (of the company) in the community,” she said. “But sometimes, you just can’t fix it. And sometimes we have to understand that maybe this isn’t the right place for us anymore because we can’t fix it.”

Though legislation may one day make workplace bullying illegal, companies — if only out of financial self-interest — should not wait for the go-ahead from the state to uproot behaviors that demean or isolate their employees, she said.

“You’ll find that if we start addressing bullying behavior, it won’t get to harassment behavior,” she said. “It won’t escalate to that level.”

She recommended that companies implement and enforce policies that either prohibit workplace bullying and harassment of any flavor, or that promote behaviors that create a respectful workplace, one in which bullying — intended or unintended — has no place.

“As an organization, we should be doing everything we can to make sure that we encourage our employees to treat each other with respect — respect, kindness, courtesy, professionalism. Because it’s that kind of behavior that makes sure we give amazing customer service,” she said. “If we internally can’t treat each other well, you’d better believe your staff is not going to treat your customer base well.”