Aggression
Buss (1961) identified eight types of aggression:
- Verbal-passive-indirect (failure to deny false rumors about target, failure to provide information needed by target)
- Verbal-passive-direct ("silent treatment", failure to return communication, i.e. phone calls, e-mails)
- Verbal-active-indirect (spreading false rumors, belittling ideas or work)
- Verbal-active-direct (insulting, acting condescendingly, yelling)
- Physical-passive-indirect (causing others to create a delay for the target)
- Physical-passive-direct (reducing target's ability to contribute, i.e. scheduling them to present at the end of the day where fewer people will be attending)
- Physical-active-indirect (theft, destruction of property, unnecessary consumption of resources needed by the target)
- Physical-active-direct (physical attack, nonverbal, vulgar gestures directed at the target)
In a study performed by Baron and Neuman, researchers found pay cuts and pay freezes, use of part-time employees, change in management, increased diversity, computer monitoring of employee performance, reengineering, and budget cuts were all significantly linked to increased workplace aggression. The study also showed a substantial amount of evidence linking unpleasant physical conditions (high temperature, poor lighting) and high negative affect, which facilitates workplace aggression.
Read more about this topic: Workplace Violence
Famous quotes containing the word aggression:
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“[Research has found that] ... parents whose children were “baby altruists” by two years firmly prohibited any child aggression against others. Adults not only restated their rule against hitting, for example, but they let the little one know that they would not tolerate the child hurting another.”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)
“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.””
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)