Bludgers, Leeches, and the Psychosocial Safety Gap in Strata

Promoting an event on social media as a newly formed strata management company is not for the faint of heart. I give you @harly_bullet and @tony_tony on Instagram for a taste of what that looks like.

We’re promoting a free event. It’s designed to educate owners on how to avoid being ripped off by contractors who over-specify and overcharge for water defect remediation. Free. Educational. In the owners’ interest. Not exactly a hard sell.

From tony_tony last night: “You and the rest of your money thieves are bludgers.” From harly_bullet the night before: “Get a real job you leech.”

Funny? A bit.Wearing? Absolutely.

And what does it say - not just about strata, but about where we are as a society - that someone offering free help to protect owners gets called a thief and a leech in return?

Read: What is Your Toxic Owner Actually Costing Everyone in the Building

Underestimate this hostility at your peril. It does real psychological harm. To the people running the social media accounts. To the strata managers answering the phones. To the committee members who volunteer their time. It grinds people down. It drives good people out.

The research says we should pay attention

I went looking for research on incivility in strata specifically. There isn’t any. That’s a problem in itself. But there is relevant work being done in organisational psychology that maps directly onto what we experience.

A 2024 study by Loh and Dollard at the University of South Australia looked into why middle-level managers face hostility from those they serve. The researchers term this “upward mistreatment.” They studied 123 organisations, 6,658 managers and nearly 35,000 employees. Their main finding was that a low psychological safety climate in an organisation leads to problems. This means when policies, practices, and procedures that protect mental health are weak or missing, employees tend to act out. Bullying and aggression directed at managers is not random. It is a predictable response to an environment that has failed to protect anyone.

The concept they use is psychosocial safety climate, or PSC. It refers to the organisational conditions that either prevent or enable mistreatment. High PSC means manageable demands, adequate resources, clear norms against hostility, and swift resolution of conflict before it escalates. Low PSC means the opposite. And in a low-PSC environment, mistreatment is not just tolerated - it becomes a form of retaliation.

What does this mean for strata?

Now transpose that onto the strata sector. Owners corporations are not traditional organisations. They have no HR department. There is no sophisticated onboarding process for lot owners. There are no teeth or resources to support the legislative codes of conduct that govern how people behave at meetings, on email threads, or on social media. There is no psychosocial safety climate at all, because nobody has ever thought to build one.

Strata managers sit in the middle. They serve the owners. They answer to the committee. They cop abuse from both directions. Committee members, in turn, are unpaid volunteers who cop abuse from the owners who elected them. And the owners? Many of them are frustrated, confused, and dealing with rising levies, defective buildings, and a system they don’t understand.

Read: Why Compulsory Training Won't Fix Your Committee - And What Actually Will

The hostility is not random. It’s structural. And if the research is right, it will keep escalating until someone builds a psychosocial safety framework around it.

A silver lining for business?

Here’s where the optimist in me won’t shut up. If the root cause of incivility is a broken environment, not broken people, then fixing the environment is a business opportunity. A strata management company that takes this seriously, that builds governance structures and communication protocols that reduce hostility and protect everyone’s psychological safety, will retain better staff, attract better clients, and differentiate itself from the pack.

Or am I just hopelessly optimistic? Whatever, it’s what I’m doing.

Where to start

The good news is that this conversation is starting. At the Strata Impact Conference on 20–21 August 2026 at the Mondrian, Gold Coast, Catherine Bell will present a paper titled Strata Without the Sting: Practical Measures to Tackle Incivility and Protect Psychological Safety. This could be the most important presentation at the conference. Not because it’s the most technical. Because it’s the most human.

If you care about the people who work or live in strata, be there.

Read: From Awesome to Difficult: The Simple Client Rating System Every Strata Manager Needs

Reference

Loh, M.Y. & Dollard, M.F. (2024). Acting out when psychosocial safety climate is low: understanding why middle-level managers experience upward mistreatment. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1336130.

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