Identifying, Responding, and Preventing Workplace Violence Literature Review
For the 10th year, April is the national observance month for workplace violence awareness. As a law enforcement professional and organization facilitator on the topic, I want to share with you the preventable nature of most workplace violence incidents by providing an analysis of how to Identify, respond to, and prevent workplace violence. Supplementing the study is a video summarizing the areas covered.
In this study, several publications were analyzed, defining a spectrum of behaviors associated with workplace violence that threaten the physical, psychological, and emotional well-being of employees in the workplace. The spectrum includes a wide range of perpetrators of such conduct including co-workers, supervisors, customers, clients, and those who may not have a direct affiliation with the organization but seek to do harm motivated by an ideology. While discrimination and harassment may be the most common forms of abusive conduct employers recognize and set policies to expressly prohibit, other forms of inappropriate behaviors exist that employees should be protected from, or at a minimum employers should take proactive measures to discourage or prevent. Education and awareness are key to such measures. In this review, four themes emerged: The perception of workplace violence, reporting, strategies, and workplace culture.
Findings indicate there are both finite and broad ways of how workplace violence is defined that are dependent upon the entity governing the rules prohibiting such behavior, the type of workplace violence that is of concern in the occupation that is being focused on, and how the perception of what constitutes violence. This in part leads to a lack of reporting of such conduct which is pervasive. Strategies to combat workplace violence exist but are not shared across all workforces. Cultural differences may hinder workplace civility for all workforces.
A complete analysis of our study can be read here.