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Jenny Hoobler
Jenny Hoobler
 
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News Release

Contact: Joseph King, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-4299

November 22, 2004

NIU researcher finds most workplace violence
comes from customers, not co-workers

DeKalb, Ill. — Companies and government agencies spend millions of dollars each year educating employees about how to reduce violence in the workplace. However, suggests a Northern Illinois University researcher, perhaps the focus should be less on protecting employees from each other and more on protecting them from customers.

Professor Jenny Hoobler, who teaches in the Department of Management in the NIU College of Business, studied municipal and county government employees and concluded that workers in that arena have more to fear from the public walking in off of the street than they do their co-workers. Her co-author on the paper, "The Enemy is Not Us: Unexpected Workplace Violence Trends," was Jennifer Swanberg, a professor in the College of Social Work at the University of Kentucky. The paper will appear in an upcoming edition of the journal Public Personnel Management.

"Because of a relatively small number of highly publicized incidents, people often talk about employees ‘going postal’ and killing their co-workers, and most violence prevention efforts focus on co-workers—how to look for warning signs, how to defuse situations with subordinates, and things like that," says Hoobler who studies dysfunctional organizational behaviors. "However, little time is spent teaching them how to protect themselves from customers, and that may be what is more needed."

In particular, Hoobler and Swanberg studied "boundary spanners," individuals who have jobs that require them to bridge the gap between organizational members (management, coworkers, etc.) and outsiders (customers, suppliers, etc.). At greatest risk in that group are those individuals who work with vulnerable (i.e. emotionally disturbed, poverty stricken) populations, and those who work late night hours and handle money.

"Our sample included people like police, jailers and clerks working the front desk in government buildings; in the general public they would be analogous to gas station and convenience store clerks, hospital staff and a wide range of other jobs. All boundary spanners are susceptible to the same problems to varying degrees," Hoobler says.

When comparing boundary spanners to other employees, Hoobler found that, overwhelmingly, individuals involved in high public contact occupations were more likely to both observe and experience verbal or physical harassment and abuse. Most often the perpetrators of that violence were customers, who accounted for 65 percent of all verbal abuse (yelling, name calling, etc.) and 83 percent of all physical abuse (pushing, hitting, etc).

Furthermore, Hoobler found that the level of violence inflicted by customers was higher in offices where a "culture of violence" more readily tolerated such acts between employees.

"We found that in workplaces where incivilities and rudeness were tolerated, that other, more serious types of aggression were more likely to happen as well," she explained.

Consequently, she concluded, efforts aimed at reducing employee-on-employee violence are important. However, she believes, employees – especially those who have a lot of contact with the public – should also be trained to defuse potentially violent situations with customers.

To date, such training is in short supply. Hoobler speculates that may be because employers feel rather powerless to control customers. "It’s easier for organizations to do something about their own employees; outsiders are more of a wild card. They kind of deal with what they can control and hope the rest takes care of itself," she says.

However, she says, the same kind of training given in hopes of reducing employee violence could be easily adapted to take into account customers.

"They could be trained to follow a series of steps to deal with situations as they escalate. These situations could be role played to teach them the steps and cheat sheets could be posted to remind them what those steps are and when it is appropriate to go to the next level," Hoobler suggests.

That these employees are so often left unequipped to handle such situations is, unfortunately, a reflection of the low esteem in which they are often held, she says.

"Very often, these are people in low paying jobs who are not highly valued so they are not given the tools to handle these situations," Hoobler says. "It is really too bad, because the skills they need are not all that difficult to teach."

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