Evaluation of Organizational Justice Intervention to Alleviate Type III Violence.

摘要

Workplace violence is an important problem worldwide; the economic burden in the U.S. is estimated to be billions of dollars. A widespread and costly segment of this problem includes those actions that are perpetrated by a current or former fellow employee, so-called Type III violence. The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of Type III workplace violence in a large public sector workforce and to develop, implement and evaluate interventions to reduce its occurrence. For the purpose of this project, we defined Type III workplace violence as coworker conflict using standardize measures of "negative acts" and bullying. The study was conducted in two phases; both were highly participatory. In phase I a Project Advisory Group assisted with the recruitment of State Government Agencies and the unions representing these workers, as well as the development, administration and completion of an email-based survey of approximately 12,000 state workers (72% response rated) employed in five State Government Agencies. The web-based survey included both subjective (self-labeling) and objective (a checklist of six negative acts) measures of bullying. Phase II involved interventions to address coworker conflict within a subset of agencies. The interventions included a three-hour conflict resolution training and the inclusion of three competencies on supervisors' annual Performance Evaluation pertaining to managing conflict.