Violence and Abuse In and Around Organisations

Ronald J. Burke, Cary L. Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138720886
• eBook ISBN: 9781351762328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This international collection examines violence and abuse in and around organisations. The collection documents the causes, specifically from the perspective of human relations and of the workplace conditions. It also highlights the specific risks associated with high-risk professions or working environments.

The first section considers types of violence and abuse, their relative frequencies, potential individual and workplace antecedents, costs to individuals, family's organisations and societies, the fact both are increasing in frequency with new types (e.g., terrorism) appearing, and why addressing these has become increasingly important for individuals and organisations. The second section considers violence in interpersonal relationships such as bullying, incivility, bias and harassment, and toxic leadership. The third section examines unsafe workplaces, accidents, injuries, and deaths. The fourth section considers exploitive work conditions and arrangements such as precarious employment, the exploitation of immigrants, and human slavery. The final section offers suggestions on ways to address violence and abuse in and around organisations. These include aggression preventative supervisor behaviours in health care, suicide prevention in the workplace, dealing with disgruntled employees and former employees, and workplace interventions that address stress reduction more broadly.

As with other titles in the Psychological and Behavioural Aspects of Risk Series, this research-based collection is firmly grounded in the boundary between work and society and offers important insights into how social and cultural problems are manifest in the workplace and how poor and abusive workplace practice, in turn, spills out into wider life.

1 Violence and abuse in the workplace

An increasing challenge

Ronald J. Burke

Consider the following examples of workplace incidents of violence and abuse.

*On August 26, 2015, a disgruntled former TV anchor shot and killed two former colleagues while they were live on air. Vester Flanagan had previously been fired from two TV stations and had claimed racial biases (Rayner & Sherlock, 2015). Flanagan had also threatened his colleagues and had been described as a “human powder keg”. These warning signs were ignored.

* Thomas Mair, a white supremacist, shot and stabbed Jo Cox, a UK politician, for her political views on June 16, 2016, while she was out doing her job (Katz & Pogatchnik, 2016). Mair was sentenced to life in prison in November 2016.

*On April 20, 2010, an explosion destroyed BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11, the biggest oil spill in history. Ingersoll, Locke, and Reavis (2011), in an extensive case study of this disaster, identified five human errors and a large mechanical failure as causes. A series of quick, cheap, and dangerous choices doomed the oil rig.

*On September 11, 2001, 8:46 a.m., terrorists flew a plane into Tower 1 of the World Trade Center (WTC). Shortly thereafter, at 9:43 a.m., terrorists flew another plane into Tower 2. About 2,000 lives were lost; women and men working in the WTC, fire fighters, and first responders (Burke & Cooper, 2008).

*A hospital in Windsor, Ontario, settled a lawsuit brought by the family of a slain nurse who was killed by a hospital doctor, a former boyfriend. The doctor had a history of disruptive and aggressive behavior (Burke, 2010).

*Two police officers were killed and another wounded when responding to a family dispute in Palm Springs California on Saturday, October 8, 2016. One, a man with eight children was about to retire, the second a 27-year-old women who had just returned from maternity leave leaving a 4-month-old daughter (McFetridge, 2016).

*A coal mining accident in China on November 23, 2016, trapped 22 miners (Toronto Star, 2016a).

Why addressing workplace violence and abuse is becoming increasingly important

There is a growing body of evidence that both individual factors and workplace experiences are linked with individual and family well-being and organizational health (Litchfield, Cooper, Hancock, & Watt, 2016). This spills over into the wider society in terms of emotional, physical, and financial tolls (Goh, Pfeffer, & Zenios, 2015; Quick & Henderson, 2016). Thus, organizations today are grappling with the increasing prevalence and costs of stress-related injuries and illnesses. We know a lot about the “causes” of these negative outcomes. We are also learning more about interventions that address these outcomes and bring benefits to individuals and organizations.

There can also be additional financial costs to organizations from violent and abusive behavior of employees These costs show up in lower levels of employee performance, absenteeism, and turnover and in some cases lawsuits. Dillon (2012) writes that the average cost to a Fortune 500 company in 1999 was $6.7 million per year for sexual harassment claims filed with Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Employee aggression against their organizations also shows up in damage to equipment, theft, and sabotage of other employees’ performance and productivity.

A key role of government is to keep its citizens safe and healthy (Bache & Reardon, 2016). An increasing number of countries (e.g., the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have introduced legislation mandating the audit of workplaces for risks to employee health and well-being (Kortum, 2014; Leka, Jain, Iavicoli, Vartia, and Ertel, 2011; World Health Organization, 2010a, 2010b). This legislation emphasizes risk prevention and health promotion. These audits typically lead to interventions tackling negative outcomes and increasing positive outcomes, and then to an evaluation of interventions designed to improve their success rate. More effort must be made to monitor and enforce compliance with such legislation however.

Structure of the chapter

This chapter, in six sections, will offer a limited review that sets the stage for the remainder of the collection. The first section is introductory, indicating why this topic is becoming increasingly important, who is interested in it, why this interest, types of violence and abuse, real life examples of these, incidence of these, and costs of these. The second section considers violence and abuse in workplace relationships such as toxic leadership, bullying, discrimination and bias, and sexual harassment. The third section examines exploitative work conditions such as child labor, sweat shops, human slavery, and the exploitation of immigrants. The fourth section examines high risk occupations such as nursing, policing, soldiers in war, first responders, and firefighters. The fifth section emphasizes workplace accidents, injuries, and deaths. The final section considers strategies for reducing violence and abuse in the workplace. Several organizational-level interventions that have been shown to be effective in improving the work well-being relationship (e.g., reducing levels of violence and stress, increasing civility).

Violence and abuse in the workplace: types, incidence, and consequences

Workplace violence consists of any act in one’s workplace in which an individual is abused, threatened, intimated, attacked, injured, or killed. In the United States almost 3 million non-fatal workplace injuries occurred in 2014, an incidence rate of 3.2 cases per 100 equivalent full-time workers, down from 3.3 in 2013. There were 4,821 fatal injuries in 2014, higher than the 2013 numbers of 4,585 fatal injuries (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). Most fatal injuries were roadway accidents (24 percent), followed by falls to lower levels (14 percent) being struck by objects or equipment (10 percent), and homicides (8 percent). Men had more fatal injuries than women (92 percent versus 8 percent), but this difference became smaller when hours worked were considered (57 percent versus 43 percent). Men had more fatal incidents in every category except homicides (women 19 percent and men 8 percent). Women were significantly more likely than men to be killed by a relative or domestic partner (32 percent versus 23 percent). Older workers (65 and older) had a significantly higher fatal injury rate than all younger age groups, fatal injury rates steadily increased from younger to older workers.

Fatal injuries increased in mining, quarry, and oil and gas extraction, reaching 18 percent in 2014. Most fatal occupational injuries occurred in agriculture, forestry fishing, and hunting (26 percent), followed by mining, quarry, and oil and gas extraction (14 percent), and transportation and warehousing (14 percent). In 2014, homicides accounted for 9 percent of fatal occupational injuries. Most homicides occurred in food and beverage locations. Robbers were more likely to kill men whereas domestic partners or family members were more likely to kill women. Workplace suicides decreased slightly in 2014 from 2013, 271 to 283.

There is a higher rate of workplace violence when workers have direct contact with clients; handle cast, valuables, or prescription drugs; work alone or in small numbers; work with unstable or violent individuals; work where alcohol is served; work in high crime areas; and protect valuable goods (Ontario Ministry of Labour, 2010). Feeling safe at work is an important aspect of job satisfaction. Yet 70 percent of organizations have never conducted an assessment of the potential for violence in their workplaces.

Wassell (2009) categorizes violence into four types including external and intrusive violence; criminal intent by unknown assailants in a robbery (also includes terrorists, protest violence, mental illness or drug related aggression, and random violence; consumer-related violence by customers, patients, clients, and family; violence against staff, including staff violence towards clients and customers); worker-on-worker violence including bullying by current or former employees or managers, domestic violence, sexual harassment at work, and third party; and organizational violence including terrorist attacks co-conducted by organizations against staff, patients, clients, and other organizations.

Denenberg and Denenberg (2010), while noting the role of individual deviance in the workplace, the “bad apples”, also stress the need to consider the work environment role here as well. This includes responding to warning signals, the need to resolve conflicts early, dealing with sexual harassment and abuse, and dealing with an imminent source of danger. They distinguish between physical and psychological violence, bullying would qualify as a form of psychological violence, addressing five types of physical violence: intrusion or entry to commit a robbery; employee attacked by customers or clients (e.g., teachers by students, nurses by patients); employee attacks a client, patient, or citizen; non-employee attacks a former girlfriend or spouse; and employee commits suicide at work.

Suicide in the workplace

Suicides account for about 31 percent of all deaths at work. The average age of an American suicide is 44, a midlife working age. Stalk and Bowman (2012) found that at least 11 percent of suicides were related to “job problems”. Job problems included poor performance reviews, tensions with co-workers, increased job pressures, and fear of layoffs and unemployment. An Australian study, (Routley & Ozanne-Smith, 2012) reported that 17 percent of suicides were work related and causes included job demotions, conflict with co-workers, the result of being bullied, and low control at work. Worker suicide then is the interaction between vulnerable individuals (e.g., mental health problems), stress at work (e.g., job insecurity, psychosocial job stressors, boring work, high job demands, low job control), and living conditions that are stressful.

Milner, Spittal, Pirkin, and La Montagne (2013) undertook a meta-analysis of 34 studies of suicide rates in various occupations. They found that workers in the lowest-skilled occupations (e.g., laborers, cleaners) were at higher risk than workers in the higher-skilled occupations (e.g., managers, clerical support workers). High-risk occupations include workers that are disadvantaged in terms of education, access to services, limited social resources, low quality of work jobs, exposure of other job risks, and limited access to community support.

Terrorism

On Bastille Day, July 14, a terrorist drove a large truck into huge crowds of tourists and residents of Nice, France, enjoying the holiday and the good weather on a major street along the beach killing 84 and injuring over a hundred (Branigan & Kaplan, 2016). Gunmen attacked a police training center in Pakistan killing at least 48 trainees on October 26, 2016 (Sattar, 2016).

Bader and Berg (2014) considered the impact on terrorism on the job performance of expatriates using a stressor-strain framework. Two types of stressors are described. Situation-related stressors consist of terrorist attacks, terrorist threat levels, safety measures and living conditions, and host country threat levels. The second type of stressors, interaction related, consist of relationships with host country staff and potential family and spouse conflict. These stressors then comprise terrorist-related stressors and strains, which in turn affect work attitudes towards one’s colleagues, one’s job and organization, one’s expatriate job performance and host country nationals. Bader and Berg (2013), in a study of 143 expatriate managers working in high-risk countries tested their later 2014 model. Both situational stressors (terrorist activity host country threat level) and role stressors (Intra-family conflicts) were assessed along with work attitudes (organizational commitment, job involvement, job satisfaction), disaffection with host country nationals, and job performance. Terrorism-related stressors culminated in higher stress levels which were associated with more negative work attitudes and negative attitudes toward the host country, leading to poorer job performance. Interestingly, work-family conflicts had the most negative impacts.

Domestic violence

The direct and indirect costs of domestic violence cost Canadian employers $77.9 million annually, not including emotional costs felt by individuals (Wathen, MacGregor, MacQuarrie, and the Canadian Labor Congress, 2014). Domestic violence was defined as “any form of physical, sexual, emotional or psychological abuse, including financial control, stalking and harassmen” (p. 3). Domestic violence can occur after the relationship has ended as well.

A 2014 Canadian survey of 8,429 respondents found that 34 percent of respondents had experienced domestic violence and 35 percent having at least one co-worker they thought had experienced it (Hudson, 2016). Employers have a responsibility to protect their workers from the effects of domestic violence. This might involve protecting their workers, developing human resource polices that support and protect workers, training human resource staff in domestic violence, identifying support people in the workplace, providing paid leave for court appearances, and reporting cases of domestic abuse to the police. Few respondents thought their organization was aware of their domestic violence experience (11 percent), but those that did thought their employer response was helpful (62 percent). Of those talking about their experience with others at work it was most likely a co-worker (82 percent) or a supervisor/manager (45 percent).

Bias and discrimination – overt and subtle

A medical emergency occurred on a flight to Detroit on the weekend of October 7, 2016. A female African-American doctor stood up to help and she was told by a female flight attendant “Oh sweetie, put your hand down, we are looking for an actual physician or nurse or some other type of medical personnel, we don’t have time to talk to you”. She continued to say she was a physician but was cut off by condescending remarks (Johnson, 2016).

A gay, male firefighter working for the Department of National Defence, Canada’s armed forces, was awarded financia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Violence and abuse in the workplace: an increasing challenge
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Violence types
• PART III Interpersonal
• PART IV Exploitative
• PART V Accidents/health and safety
• PART VI Interventions
• Index