Critical Incident Response for Workplace Violence By Mark Attridge, PhD, MA and Bob VandePol, MSW


Critical incidents involving workplace violence are sudden, unexpected, often life-threatening time-limited events that can inhibit an individual’s capacity to respond adaptively. This article addresses the psychological aspects of trauma from workplace violence, how it is treated through critical incident response services, and the business value of providing a proper response.


Workplace Violence Consequences The impact of violent incidents experienced at work can be debilitating and stems from recurrent intrusive images, persistent fear, displaced anger, guilt, and isolation. Extreme critical incident stressors can even result in personal crises, traumatic stress, and post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When one person willfully harms another it breaches legal, ethical, and “the way it’s supposed to be” boundaries. Persons bereaved by violent causes have more PTSD, grief, and depression symptoms than those bereaved by natural causes. In addition to their human toll, workplace violence incidents are disruptive to workplace operations. Productivity, quality, profitability, and other financial measures are adversely affected by such events.


Critical Incident Response to Trauma Immediate application of psychological first aid that helps people access personal strengths and resiliency supports is crucial to reverse self-attribution from victim to survivor.3 Critical Incident Response(CIR) refers to an integrated comprehensive, multi-component, crisis intervention approach for addressing the psychological consequences of critical incidents.4 CIR can accomplish psychological closure, prevention, and mitigation of traumatic stress, and promote return to normalcy, benefiting the individual, organization, and the community at large.


CIR services are now commonly used in the United States and in many other countries around the world and are often included as part of a broad range of services offered to organizations by employee assistance programs.


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Eight Truths Employers Should Know Background screening is now a critical task to ensure employers avoid the legal and financial nightmare of hiring employees who are unfit, unqualified, danger- ous, or dishonest. However, some employers have misconceptions aboutbackgroundchecks. Here are eight simple truths every business, should know:


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2011 Workplace Violence


Fact Sheet


THE BULLY AT WORK


The Common Thread of Communication: Mobbing Behavior Categories


By Gail Pursell Elliott


The workplace mobbing research done by Dr. Heinz Leymann in the 1980’s


identified 45 behaviors that emerge during a mobbing process. They were then grouped into five categories as follows:


- Attacks on self expression and communication. - Attacks on a person’s social relations. - Attacks on a person’s reputation.


- Attacks on the quality of a person’s professional and life situation.


- Direct attacks on a person’s health.


All of these categories include various forms of negative communication as well as other activities. Although much of the workplace bullying literature has addressed supervisor bullying of employees, recent studies have found that a large percentage of the disparaging communication and behavior is peer to peer. The fragile state of employment and the uncertain nature of the current economy serve to exacerbate these situations. Regardless of whether mobbing is initiated laterally or supervisor to employee or employee to supervisor, eventually the targeted individual is attacked from all directions.


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