Violence in the Workplace

• Author: Hy Bloom
• Pages: 1169-1222

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CHAPTER 55

Violence in the Workplace

Hy Bloom

I. INTRODUCTION

e range of medico-legal and psycholegal issues that forensic psychiatrists and psychologists have come

to address over the past several decades has been broadening. Although mental health and legal practi-

tioners are prone to debating the utility and ethics of psychiatric and psychological participation in the

courts, the need for these services has done nothing but expand. Workplace violence consultation is yet

another area of psychological and psychiatric expertise, born of the recent recognition that there are due

diligence obligations to provide safety and security within organizations.

Workplace violence has become a growing concern over the last ten to twenty years, in part owing to

an increase in the reporting of workplace aggression, and also due to public recognition of the phenom-

enon of workplace violence and its impact. Public concern was heightened during the early to mid-1990s

with a series of incidents in the US Postal Service that led to the coining of the term “going postal” as a

euphemism for becoming violent in the workplace.

eir increasing concern led public and private sector organizations to rely on mental health experts,

especially those with backgrounds and experience in violence risk assessment, to evaluate workers and

situations that cause concern, and to assist with establishing workplace violence policies and protocols.

Workplace violence is worldwide; according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), Canada

is well represented, ranking fourth of thirty-two countries in terms of workplace assaults (Chappell &

DiMartino, 2000). e ILO’s 1996 survey also found that close to 10 percent of women in the Canadian

workforce reported having been sexually victimized in the workplace.

Drawing on earlier information from Pizzino (1994), the ILO further noted a markedly high number

of reports of verbal aggression (70 percent), and a high number of reports, from public sector workers, of

physical aggression (40 percent were struck and 30 percent were grabbed and/or scratched). Of interest,

Pizzino’s (2002) later study found that supervisors accounted for 20 percent, and the public for 38 per-

cent, of reported aggressive behaviours toward unionized workers. In the United States, the US Bureau of

Labor Statistics (2012) reported an overall decline (by 52 percent) in workplace homicides between 1992

and 2010, although there was a 13 percent increase in workplace homicide among women. Homicide

remains a leading cause of death at work for American women (Tiesman et al., 2012).

Workplace aggression has consequently become an area for forensic psychiatric and psychological

consultation and research. It provides an opportunity to further our understanding of aggression, vio-

lence, and the factors that promote those behaviours in a workplace context. Violence perpetrators and

the contexts in which they oend share a number of characteristics. e social and cultural environ-

ments of workplaces, and the individuals who become violent within them, however, have unique fea-

tures that may distinguish them from perpetrators of violence in other contexts.

Aside from its heuristic value, the study of workplace violence provides mental health consultants

with an opportunity to make a signi cant contribution to reducing the individual, social, organizational,

and economic costs associated with workplace violence.

Hy Bloom

e deleterious eects of workplace aggression have wide-reaching implications. An incident oen

results in both individual and organizational damage, and has implications for the organization’s public

image, and the morale of its workers.

is chapter will review the nature and phenomenology of workplace violence, beginning with a

detailed and considerably expanded (from the one commonly used) classication of the various types

of workplace violence (Cal/OSHA, 1995). Moreover, the chapter will provide the reader with an under-

standing of the legal framework for dealing with workplace violence in Canada.

Workplace violence is a broad concept that includes many dierent types and severities of violence.

e instigating scenarios, types of victi ms, psychopathology of the perpetrators, and motivational forces

vary. Many categories overlap, making the task of identifying the causes of the behaviour (with a view to

prevention) dicult. From an assessor’s perspective, for example, evaluating the risk posed by a worker

with repetitive assaultive behaviour is dierent from assessing a developing threat of targeted violence, a

form of violence oen intended to be lethal. e distinction between risk assessment and threat assess-

ment was reviewed in Chapter 24, Assessing Imminent Risks for Violence and reats, and is touched

on again, in the workplace violence context, in Section VIII of this chapter.

is chapter will also provide the reader with a clinical framework and tools for assessing various

types of workplace violence scenarios, from non-lethal, non-imminent workplace violence to lethal, im-

minent th reat.

Fully addressing workplace violence risk (and prevention) does not involve focusing only on a violent

worker, but also on the systemic factors implicated in workplace violence, and consequently the chapter

concludes with a brief review of the assessment of systemic risk for workplace violence.

II. DEFINITION OF WORKPLACE VIOLENCE

e behaviours subsumed under the heading “workplace violence” have expanded considerably over

the last number of years. A broad denition oers the advantage of allowing organizations to set a high

standard of workplace conduct and to curtail any behaviour or aggression that is harmful to anyone

in the work environment. e broad denition denes workplace violence as “any actual or attempted

physical or non-physical act or conduct that induces fear and causes concern about physical safety and/or

psychological well-being in a worker or someone close to him/her, or in other organizational personnel”

(Bloom et al., 2002).

e meaning of “violence” includes a wide range of physical acts and behaviours, but it also means

aggressive acts that occur without touching, or aggressive acts against an inanimate object, like the

organization or its public image. Overt physical acts include assaults of any level of severity, and non-

consensual touching, whether blatantly violent, sexual, or designed to irritate. Touching may be included

in harassing or inappropriately jocular “locker room” behaviours. e point is that it is unwanted and

intrusive. Violence that does not involve a physical act or touching includes threats, whether direct or

oblique, either conveyed to the victim or third party; the invocation of weapons; intimidation; harass-

ment; stalking; or bullying. Violence can also include words, actions, and gestures that convey ill-will,

or hateful and negative feelings. is includes passive aggression, obstructionism, defamation, or racism.

Violence directed at the organization is usually perpetrated to cause nancial harm, to send a

message that induces fear and leads to poor workplace morale, or to tarnish the organization’s image.

Behaviours in this category include arson, vandalism, the, industrial sabotage, and leaking damaging

information about the company to the media. According to Ambrose et al. (2002), perceived injustice is

the most common cause of workplace sabotage. Oen, although not invariably, the object of the sabotage

can be correlated to the nature of the perceived injustice. For example, an employee who believes he has

too few work breaks damages a machine to provide downtime.

Violence in the Workplace 

Workplace violence can take many forms. Aggression may be directed specically or generally to-

ward an individual or company, and can involve physical contact, or harm committed without touching.

Table 55.1 below illustrates some of the various forms aggression can take.

Table . Types of Workplace Violence

Typ e

Hands of‌f Hands on

 

Target

Company

• Leaking damaging information to press

• Harmful publicity

• Reckless disobeyance of major

organizational policies and procedures

• Obstructionism: passive-aggressive

behaviour

• Vandalism

• Arson

• Sabotage

• Theft

• Cyber attacks

 

Individual (or particular

groups of individuals)

• Passive-aggression, obstructionism

• Sarcasm, defamation, humiliation,

degradation

• Marked incivility

• Obscene and of‌fensive behaviour

• Threats by gesture, posture, direct,

through third parties

• Bullying, intimidation

• Racism, hate discrimination

• Stalking

• Ostracism and shunning

• Unconsented-to touching

• Physical assault

• Sexual assault

• Assault with weapon

• Murder

·random

·targeted

Mayhew and Chappell (2007) note the benets of a denition of occupational violence that has

wide parameters, and in this regard, they rely on the denition preferred by the National Occupational

Health and Safety Commission (NOHSC, 2003) of Australia, as follows: “Workplace violence may in-

clude: homicide, assaults, threats, verbal abuse, behaviours that create an environment of fear, stalking,

degrading and/or violent initiation rites, and behaviours that lead to severe stress or avoidance behaviour

in the recipient.” ese authors take issue with the International Labour Oce (ILO) reducing the scope

of behaviours that its earlier dra Code of Practice (September 2003) covered. e new denition, these

authors believe, “diminish[es the] legitimacy being given to the emotional and psychological conse-

quences following violence at work.”

Waddington et al. (2005) oer a critical view of the more inclusive denition of workplace violence.

While it respects the experience of those who feel victimized, it is so broad “that almost any situation

that a person nds disagreeable can be described as a form of ‘violence.’” is, according to these authors,

results in a confusing picture that hampers research.

e denition of workplace violence in Ontario’s Bill 168 (2009) is limited to actual or threatened

“physical force” causing a “physical injury.” Psychological injury or harm consequently falls outside the

denition, unless it meets the denition of “workplace harassment.”

A denition of workplace violence that encompasses so many dierent types of problem behaviours

has both positive and negative sides. e broad denition promotes an enhanced appreciation of the

range of behaviours that are undesirable, exert a noxious eect in the workplace, and that will ulti mately

be actionable. e drawback of including so many behaviours under the heading of workplace violence