Community Belonging and Values-Based Leadership as the Antidote to Bullying and Incivility

This article examines the role of community as an antidote to bullying and incivility. The question we ask our readers to consider is: Does cultivating a culture of belonging for all acknowledge a most basic human need that members of organizations seek to meet during their day-to-day work lives? Belonging can serve as an antidote to feeling othered, which sows the seeds of separateness, isolation, absence of community, bullying, and incivility. Examples of othering behavior operate along a continuum that normalizes bullying, incivility and can escalate to include racism, sexism, classism, and a range of other non-inclusive behaviors. This conceptual article draws on our collective experience as educators in leadership. With humility, we rely on our efforts to amplify values-based leadership, community belonging, and ways of knowing from long ago wisdom. We seek to cultivate communities of belonging among leaders in education and ultimately in organizations and communities that exist beyond the classroom. We advocate belonging as an antidote to othering behaviors that can include bullying and incivility and draw on literature to support our approach.