Workplace Violence Paper

If you are like me, you wonder where are these people working?! According to OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety Administration) certain work factors, processes and interactions put us at increased risk for violence. Examples include:

Mishandling of terminations, changes in behavior, making common threats, conflicts with employees, emotional outburst and history of frequency job changes have been identified as indicators by the FBI as onsets of workplace violence. The Government leaves it up to the employers to provide a safe working

Have you ever been physically assaulted or even threatened at a place of business you have worked at? If you didn’t know this is a crime and you could be charged with workplace violence. Workplace violence is any act of physical abuse or threats made in the workplace of any sort to any employee or multiple employees. It can take place anywhere around the workplace and has become a very big concern around the country. According to research, there are 2 million cases a year involving workplace violence. Many people are becoming victims of this and you should be aware when it comes your way in any form. The main people who are targeted in this are mostly workers who exchange money with the public, correctional officers, teachers, and healthcare employees.

The workplace is not immune to violence. It can happen anywhere, anytime, by anyone and sparked by any reason. What is expected of a typical workday morning is the alarm going off, a quick breakfast, rush hour traffic, and greeting co-workers upon entering the job site. Workers go about their normal workday and leaving for home without incident. What is not expected or typical is the chaos of gunfire, stabbing, bombing, and any other unimaginable, horrific event in the workplace. The events in between a twenty-four hour span from one workday to the next are unpredictable even in the best working conditions or locations. Although the events that bomb shelled the media in the past years are horrific in nature, they represent a small portion of

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), " each week, an average of 20 workers are murdered and 18,000 are assaulted at work. Non-fatal assault’s at work result in millions of lost days and cost businesses’ millions of lost workdays. And the most disturbing finding homicide is the leading cause of death for women in the workplace." (http://www.ocpapsych.com/mtart4.htm). As a result, violence in the workplace has received considerable attention in the press and media and also in safety and health professionals.

The purpose of this study is to examine how to prevent workplace violence using one the research categories (Type III) and the OSHA five guidelines to identify warning signs to prevent worker-to-worker violence. Category Type III (Worker-on-Worker) violence occurs when an employee assaults or attacks his or her co-workers. In some cases, these incidents can take place after a series of increasingly hostile behaviors from the perpetrator (IPRC, 2001). Will a prevention program designed to spot or identify negative or disgruntled employees, abet in the prevention of workplace

Administration, (OSHA) also later recommended that every employer needs to establish a no-tolerance policy for workplace violence, including any form of bullying and verbal or nonverbal threats. Employers with zero-tolerance violence policies are more likely to have lower incident rates. When employers mandate this policy, employees not directly involved in violent incidents but are witnesses are obligated to participate in the investigation by the employer or authorities. Those employees not willing to participate may be dismissed for lack of cooperation. This incentive will make the investigation and the zero-tolerance violence policies more significant. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, (OSHA) advises organizational leaders as follows: "Employers must train all employees, including temporary workers, on the hazards specific to that workplace before they start working" ("OSHA Highlights", 2013).

I really enjoyed reading your post. Security in the workplace is a very important topic. Any organization, no matter what kind, can experience workplace violence. Workplace violence often includes behaviors such as physical assault, threats, harassment, intimidation, and bullying (Mathis, Jackson, Valentine & Meglich, 2017, p. 558).

I can see what employers do not want to have their business in the news for anything negative, especially for a workplace violence issue. I do not think that workplace violence is something new, it is just something we hear about more frequently now with the 24/7 media covers. Millions of workers experience violence or the threat of violence in their workplaces every year. These crimes range from physical assaults to robbery and homicide. Although the number of such crimes has generally declined in recent years, workplace homicide is the fourth-leading cause of fatal occupational injury, and the number of workplace homicides of government employees is actually increasing (cite victims of crime). Until researching I was did not realize that workplace homicide is the fourth leading cause of injury, this is truly a sad and frightening

From 1980-1989 nearly 7,600 workers were workplace homicide victims in the United States. (3) In 1998 there were 6,026 fatal work injuries in the United States, 709 were workplace homicides. (2) Assaults and threats of violence at work equal almost 2 million a year. An average of 1.5 million a year for simple assault, 396,000 aggravated assaults, 51,000 rapes and sexual assaults, 84,000 robberies, and 1,000 homicides. The average risk rate for various occupation is as follows (per 1,000): Police officers 306, private security guards 218, taxi drivers 184, prison guards 117, bartenders 91, mental health professionals 80, gas station attendants 79, convenience, liquor store clerks 68, mental health custodial workers 63, junior high/middle school teachers 57, bus drivers 45, special education teachers 41, high school teachers 29, elementary school teachers 16, and college teachers 3. (2) All of these occupations have already been pre-identified as having a higher risk for workplace violence; however, there are ways to identify if your organization has potential risk factors.

Clearly the company needs to ensure it has a prevention plan to disrupt the workplace violence occurring. This plan should include training for everyone on what to do if violence happens to them, having clear disciplinary procedures in place, fostering a climate of trust inside the organization and helping victims get treatment from professionals when they have been

The issue of workplace violence challenges many organizations today, and many of these organizations do not have well defined structures on how to handle it. It is one of the emerging concepts in the field of HR and perhaps that is why many HR personnel have not come into clear terms with it. In addition to this, it takes a broader approach than what people think violence is, hence complicating its ideology.

Preventing workplace violence has to be executed around a dynamic approach in which multiple factors are combined to place workers in a safe working environment. The first and most comprehensive tool that every organization should have is a workplace violence policy. An effective workplace violence policy has two main focal points. “First, good policies provide clear guidelines for expected behavior, definitions of unacceptable behavior, and outline the penalties for violating the policy” (Baron, Hoffman, & Merrill, 2000). This is imperative and must be communicated constantly to all employees. An employee’s initial immersion into the policy should occur before they begin to work for the job they were hired to do. Every organization’s

Does an employee still have the right to refuse work because of violence in the

Workplace coarseness and violence are growing challenges for human resource development (HRD) professionals. The occurrence of violent behavior at work. The frequency, intensity, and duration of coarse behavior should be a concern to leaders in any organization. All too often seemingly isolated and incidents like, instigating a joke can lead to patterns of coarse behavior and it leads to bullying and even physical violence. Many researchers have noted numerous detrimental outcomes of workplace coarseness and violence. A coarse work environment may lead to poor employee health, low job satisfaction, low organizational productivity and commitment, high employee turnover, and poor application of learning at work. Each is a form of aggressive behavior. In as much as coarse behavior is linked to poor individual for e.g. job performance and organizational-level outcomes, human resource development (HRD) is increasingly being called to implement useful strategies for dealing effectively with this vital workplace issue.