New Study Suggests Management Style More than Employee Personality Cause of Violence

Queen's School of Business (Canada) professor Julian Barling is the co-author of a recent study on supervisor-targeted aggression, which was published in the Journal Of Applied Psychology. Barling's findings suggest that aggression against supervisors was a result of perceived feelings of injustice and abusive supervision and not an individual's history of violence or self-esteem. He states that most organizations try to prevent violence try to exclude people through pre-employment screening and not paying enough attention to how they are treated once they are employed. The study was based on responses from questionnaires from 105 employees (78 females, 27 males) at two Canadian universities who worked two jobs, with a different supervisor in each job. Significantly, the study found that supervisor-directed aggression in one job did not translate into aggression against the supervisor in the other job, indicating that much of the aggression was due to conditions in the particular workplace as opposed to the individual's personality.