The Danger of Group Thinking

Workplace violence prevention is too complicated to leave to a committee, unless we can find a better way to prepare its members for the task.

When it comes to workplace violence prevention, if you turn to advice from the experts, you receive the standard suggestions of writing a policy and assembling a cross-functional team to evaluate events. These cross-functional teams typically can recommend an array of serious management actions, including administrative warnings, management comments, forced leave without payâ¬even termination. (All these outcomes involve getting the individual help through an employee assistance program.) Yet in my experience, I've found that it's extremely difficult to get the teams to actually use these tools. So why do we provide ourselves with a false sense of addressing the problem?

The reason quite simply is a difficulty of predicting human behavior, coupled with the desire to treat others the way we ourselves want to be treated. How many times have you heard from a direct supervisor, "Everyone has a bad day," or, "This isn't normal; he or she just needed to blow off some steam." We all know that anyone can get frustrated over issues in the workplace. This provides the typical manager enough doubt to err on the side of dismissing behavior as not being something that requires evaluation for violence. In fact, one of our culture's favorite hero figures, portrayed in TV and the movies, is the seasoned professional whose life is full of conflict and is hanging on an overstressed wire, yet who is so committed to the job that he lands the big deal or comes through with the big bust.

Sure, training employees and managers to recognize warning signs and bring them to the attention of the right people is a necessary and important part of a workplace violence program. What is typically not discussed is how to evaluate behavior for the potential of future violence. The groups don't have ready access to experts who can best determine if a person has the requisite controls to manage his or her own anger and keep from acting out in the future. The cross-functional team often lacks the confidence to make life-altering decisions, and there's little attention paid to how members should mechanically conduct their evaluation. Why is this important? Several things might happen to the group's decision-making process:

The typical response, especially after an education and awareness campaign within a company, is to evaluate many events and come to the conclusion that the bar for workplace violence evaluation needs to be set higher. The group overreacts. The negative outcome is that fewer events are sent to the team for evaluation.

Another outcome is that the group becomes numb to the possibility of workplace violence. That could be when there's a track record of evaluations that were marked for local manager action but did not lead to any major event, even though the manager failed to monitor the employee. This is dangerous because there could be a long delay between the warning behavior and the violent outcome. After a while, the group is seen as a Chicken Little, always crying that "the sky is falling."

Finally, there is the "usual suspects" mentality that stifles honest discussion and closes minds, thus harming the group dynamics. This is where the HR representatives to committees begin to see themselves as the evaluated employee's defense attorneys, and the CSOs are typically typecast as the kind of people who would throw their own grandmother in prison.