Assuming that you personally are not prone to violence either in the workplace or elsewhere, you need to know if someone you work with, work for, or who works for you is a candidate for work place violence. “For the first time in the history of humankind,” say authors Tom and Marilyn Ross, “it is safer to live in the wilderness than in civilization.” Most of the population feels that it’s risky to go for a walk in their own neighborhoods after dark. The authors observe that “this fear inhibits our freedom as surely as do a barbed wire fence.”

Violence at Work Mirrors the Larger Society

A Centers for Disease Control study reveals that within a 30-day period, “more than one in three high school boys admitted to carrying a gun, knife, or club.” As the general level of violence in society rises, so does the level of violence at work. In a given 12-month period, more than two million hostile attacks at work on bosses or co-workers occurred in America. More than 1,000 employees murdered their bosses.

“There’s something that is allowing the expression of violent behavior, and I think it is a cultural issue,” says Dr. Donald Vereen of the National Institute on Mental Health. Citing more violence in American society today, Vereen believes that violence in general is not easily isolated from the work place. “It has been well documented that our society is changing in terms of diversity, the availability and use of guns, especially automatic weapons, and other factors. What these factors do is break down established norms in terms of how we settle disputes.”

Kevin Flynn, Ph.D., a Los Angeles based psychologist, believes that there’s a high correlation between violent acts and the use of alcohol and other drugs. Alcohol and other drugs are associated with 50% of spouse abuse cases, 68% of manslaughter charges, and 52% of rapes. Chemical and substance abuse in one’s personal life obviously have ramifications to one’s performance and behavior in the work place.

Subversion is also present in the work place. Deliberate damage to computer hardware and software is occurring in the work place with alarming regularity. These are not signs of a well functioning society or harmonious work places. While I don’t condone such violence, I think I’m beginning to understand it. The volume of information, the number of responsibilities, and the items which compete for the time and attention of the typical employee today rises beyond anyone’s capacity to fathom what’s occurring.

You already know that the volume of information you’re encountering is heading up an exponential curve. By the year 2000, the information you’re exposed to will increase to sixty times more information than you encountered in 1990! That alone, if there were no terrible bosses, unfair working conditions, and impossible demands, would be a perfect recipe for increasing stress.

More people are feeling more stress at work, more often, than at anytime in history. A majority of managers say their job is more stressful than it was a decade ago — no surprise there. And, tellingly, many predict that their jobs will be even more stressful in the next three to four years.

Making due under intense pressure is virtually a prerequisite for climbing the corporate ladder. But, everyone has a limit. “Today, stress levels are so high that managers’ abilities to cope are inadequate,” according to Professor James A. Wilson at the University of Pittsburgh. By some estimates, at least half of American managers suffer too much stress and are becoming abusive, intolerant, and dictatorial.

These are signs of stress bubbling over the top:

• When General Motors gave a mid-fifties manager the option of early retirement, he had to think about it carefully. Four of his colleagues in similar situations accepted the offer, but shortly thereafter, they killed themselves.
• When J.C. Penney moved its corporate headquarters from New York to Plano, Texas, many employees were so despondent that the company ended up increasing its professional counseling staff from one person to twelve.
• Mental health experts estimate that as many as 15% of executives and managers suffer from depression or critical levels of stress. One manager says that when you’re overwhelmed, “It’s like you’re a live wire with no insulation. The slightest little nudge, you spark. You want to scream out the window…even when the phone rings, it irritates you. You don’t eat right or sleep well. You feel you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders and nobody is going to help you.”

Taking the Pulse

AT&T surveyed 40,000 employees to gain a better understanding of corporate morale. A majority of employees indicated that they were concerned with job security, heavy workloads, being treated fairly, increasing job pressure, and supervisors that they were certain had little regard for their career development. Some companies are beginning to recognize that the work environment and the demands placed on today’s career professional simply exceeds the bounds of what it takes to keep a person buy soma 350 productive and balanced.

When Work Place Stress Is at Dangerous Levels

Far too many companies, however, don’t understand the nature of the problems confronting their work forces, and are loathe to admit it. Few corporations want to address the reality that their policies and procedures contribute to high levels of stress, even high enough to result in work place violence. Sometimes they offer programs, but such programs predictably do not address the needs of seriously stressed or highly depressed employees. It’s prudent to recognize work situations that lead to the possibility of someone around you resorting to work place violence.

The odds are slim that you have the ability to change your corporate or organizational culture. It’s best to take a defensive posture — arm yourself with some basic facts about work place violence and basic tips on what you can do to help others and yourself. You’re not going to be getting a Ph.D. in counseling soon, and even if you did, you can’t be everywhere, know everything, and help everyone.

The Rising Tide of Work Place Violence

The Society for Human Resources Management surveyed their members on the topic of work place violence, and found that one-third of respondents reported that their work place had experienced a violent incident in the past five years, and that the frequency of such incidents is on the rise. Here is a summary of the findings:

• 44% of respondents said that the most recent incident of work place violence occurred in the current year.
• Guns were involved in 17% of the incidents.
• Stabbings were involved in 7.5% of incidents.
• Employee-to-employee violence occurred in 53.5% of incidents.
• Employee-to-supervisor violence occurred in 12.6% of incidents.
• Customer-to-employee violence occurred in 6.9% of incidents.
• Supervisor-to-employee violence occurred in 2.5% of incidents.
• Relative-to-employee violence occurred in 2.5% of incidents.

Respondents indicated that the motivation for the most recent violent incident was a personality conflict. A majority of respondents said that they would not have been able to identify the assailants’ potential for violence; however, the most common traits of those assailants identified were anger, aggressiveness, and threatening behavior. Other common traits of assailants included apparent emotional or mental disorders; loner status; obsessiveness; and overly quiet, morose, or sullen behavior.

Watch out in the summer–on average, more violent acts occurred in June, July, August, and September, and less violent acts occurred in November, December, and January.

Many respondents said that the violence in their organizations has led to increased stress. Following a violent incident in the work place, many respondents said that their organization relied on a professional employee assistance program, while other resources, cited in descending order, included counseling for employees, training, increased security, more thorough security, and reference checks among new hires, and installation of new security systems.

Neither Rain nor Snow nor Gunpoint…

In recent years, the U.S. Postal Service has been gripped by work place violence. The Postal Service employed more than three-quarters of a million people in 1992, and that same year endured more than 2,000 cases of work place violence during that year. In his book, Ticking Bombs: Defusing Violence in the Work Place, author Michael Mantell says that, “Work place violence has never been a prominent business or social issue until now.” Work place violence has grown and evolved from an “underground problem for business into a substantial hazard, not only for the nineties, but well into the next century.”

“Most senior managers and executives will admit that they know of specific incidents of work place violence; yet, they don’t know how to deal with the instigators, the victims, and the related business, legal, and emotional problems their organizations face as a whole,” say Mantel. “What was unimaginable 20 years ago is now a cold, hard reality. For those of us who have worked all our teenage, young adult, and older adults lives, the fact that the work place is no longer a safe haven is hard to accept. To now have to factor work place violence into our rock-solid beliefs about what work is and what our jobs do for us is almost unfathomable.”

Despite all of the alarming statistics that he and others can cite regarding the incidence of violence in the work place, there are countless other incidents that occur every day.

“These involve fists and feet, threats and intimidation, and fear and terror,” says Mantel . Such incidents go unheralded. They don’t make the 6 o’clock news. Hence, the number of serious acts of violence that take place on the job each year may be far greater than anyone can imagine, and the problem eats at our social fabric like a cancer.

While it would be easy to dismiss many incidents as simply another “nut with a gun at work” story, the problem is far deeper, far more complex. As of the mid 1990’s, the situation is getting worse. Murder on the job is now the third leading cause of occupational death.