In modern society office workers’ life is being formed amidst a relationship with organization. As for modern people, the workplace is a physical place, which obtains economic profit and social position, and is also the psychological space of experiencing diverse emotions such as happiness, satisfaction, anger, discouragement. Especially in case of white-collar workers who work at an office spending a significant portion of the day, the relative importance that a workplace possesses in their life cannot help being bigger. According to a rise in the weight that a workplace takes up in modern people’s life in this way, various problems are occurring focussing on an office in the workplace. What is most typical out of it is just ‘workplace violence.’
The workplace violence causes considerable damage and side effect to the whole society as well as organization without stopping in an individual victim''s matter. In other words, the problem is serious because of being likely capable of leading to a loss of organization caused by lawsuit, to the secondary deviation, and to violence and suicide as well as the primary results such as a drop in a victim’s job satisfaction, an increase in turnover, and a reduction in productivity.
As this workplace violence is already regarded as a high crime abroad, a research is being performed that tries to seek a predictor variable and an influential factor from a variety of perspectives(such as individual characteristic, situational characteristic, environmental characteristic, etc). In case of Korea, most of the researches are restrictively performed focusing on victims such as emotional response, job satisfaction, turnover intention according to the experience of workplace violence. Thus, it is difficult to be found an attempt to closely examine empirically causes of workplace violence focusing on perpetrators. Accordingly, an in-depth research is urgently needed for seeking influential factors of violence targeting perpetrators or potential perpetrators.
The purpose of this study is to empirically verify the white-collar workers’ individual factors(trait anger and narcissism), situational factors(work-related frustrated events), environmental factors(violence climate) that influence on an intention of workplace violence(verbal violence, physical violence).
To do this, this study first established a research analysis model through book forms, academic articles and dissertations, research reports, and statistical materials at home and abroad related to workplace violence, and carried out an empirical research in order to verify factors that influence on workplace violence in white-collar workers based on the theoretical background that previous researches had suggested. And this study was performed in order of selecting variables, determining a sampling method & survey subjects, designing a survey, and conducting a questionnaire research. Especially, to examine an intention of workplace violence, which is a dependent variable, survey subjects were presented with four virtual scenarios.
The questionnaire survey was carried out the computer-assisted web interviewing(CAWI) targeting white-collar workers at large companies and small and mid-sized businesses in Capital area(Seoul, Gyeonggi, and Incheon) from January 16, 2017 to January 23. To verify research hypotheses, in other words, to examine the effects of each in independent variables on white-collar workers’ intention of workplace violence hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed.
From the empirical analysis, main findings can be summarized as follows;
First, it was found that trait anger has positive effects on white-collar workers’ intention of direct and indirect verbal violence. That is to say, the higher trait anger led to a rise in white-collar workers’ intention of direct and indirect verbal violence. Second, trait anger and employee’s tolerance of violence have statistically significant effects on white-collar workers’ intention of direct physical violence. In detail, the higher trait anger and the higher employees’ tolerance of violence led to a hike in an intention of direct physical violence. Third, it is verified that age, trait anger, and employee’s tolerance of violence have positive effects on white-collar workers’ intention of indirect physical violence. And those effects were significant. the older age, the higher trait anger, and the higher employees’ tolerance of violence led to an increase in an offender''s intention of indirect physical violence.
We suggest some policy alternatives in order to cope with the white-collar workers’ workplace violence based on the analytical results as follows;
① To allow white-collar workers to possibly manage and control their individual negative emotion such as trait anger themselves, a company should introduce diverse in-house psychological training programs and will need to form organizational culture available for free communication between upper and lower in organization.
② In terms of violence climate, the company management should maximally use an intermediary manager in organization in order to effectively prevent workplace violence, and needs to intensively carry out the prevention education of workplace violence targeting intermediary managers so that the board managers’ intention of rooting out workplace violence can be properly delivered even to all employees.
③ To reinforce a regulation against workplace violence in the national dimension relevant legislative bills, which are now in a state of drift at the National Assembly, need to be promptly handled. Legislative efforts will lead to being able to achieve an effect of arousing people’s caution about workplace violence.
This study has the following limitations.
First of all, in sampling the survey subjects, it is limiting the survey subjects only to the white-collar employees who work at private enterprises where are located in Seoul, Gyeonggi, and Incheon area. This leads to being unreasonable to generalize the outcome of this study as a case of all the white-collar classes nationwide.
Second, in the process of writing virtual scenarios, a writer’s subjective imagination had no choice but to be considerably added to establishing situations and describing actions.
Third, this study limited research subjects only to verbal violence and physical violence. Thus, psychological violence was excluded from a scope of research such as ‘workplace bullying’ that occurs frequently in reality.
Accordingly, more systematic and synthetic researches are expected to be actively carried out on workplace violence by supplementing these limitations down the road.