Abstract
Background: Workplace violence is a growing social problem among many professions, but it particularly affects the health sector. Studies have mainly focused on evaluating user violence toward health professionals, with less attention being paid to other sources of conflict, such as co-workers themselves. There are different manifestations of this violence in what has been called a context of tolerated or normalized violence among co-workers. However, its effects are far from being tolerable, as they have an impact on general health and job satisfaction and contribute to burnout among professionals. Based on this idea, and following the line of the previous literature, nursing staff are a population at high risk of exposure to workplace violence. For this reason, the present study aims to evaluate exposure to lateral violence or violence among co-workers in nursing staff in public health services and the relationship of this exposure with some of the most studied consequences. (2) Methods: A cross-sectional associative study was carried out in which scales of workplace violence (HABS-CS), burnout (MBI-GS), job satisfaction (OJS), and general health (GHQ-28) were applied to a sample of 950 nursing staff from 13 public hospitals located in the southeast of Spain. (3) Results: The results show that nursing staff have a high exposure to violence from their co-workers, which is more common in male nurses. Greater exposure is observed in professionals with between 6 and 10 years of experience in the profession, and it is not characteristic of our sample to receive greater violence when they have less experience or are younger. A positive correlation is observed with high levels of burnout and a negative correlation with general health and job satisfaction. (4) Conclusions: The results of this work contribute to increasing the scientific evidence of the consequences of a type of workplace violence frequent among nursing staff and to which less attention has been paid in relative terms to other types of prevalent violence. Organizations should be aware of the importance of this type of workplace violence, its frequency and impact, and implement appropriate prevention policies that include the promotion of a culture that does not reward violence or minimize reporting. A change of mentality in the academic environment is also recommended in order to promote a more adequate training of nursing staff in this field.
Highlights
Violence and harassment in the world of work is considered a violation of human rights and a threat to equal opportunities
The specific goals of this study focus on the lateral violence perceived by nursing professionals in public hospitals in the Region of Murcia, Spain, as follows: (1) identifying differences associated with higher exposure to personal, social, and work-related violence according to socio-demographic and socio-occupational variables; (2) empirically obtaining subgroups depending on their exposure to violence, and analyzing them according to their reported levels of burnout, satisfaction, and general health
51% of the sample was exposed to lateral violence of a personal nature (e.g., “Some co-workers spread false rumors about me”), 37.3% of social nature (e.g., “Some co-workers have stopped talking to me”), and 21.3% work-related (e.g., “Some co-workers deliberately accuse me of other people’s mistakes”)
Summary
Violence and harassment in the world of work is considered a violation of human rights and a threat to equal opportunities. It is defined as the incidents where professionals. The difference seems to be that those with greater proximity and/or prolonged exposure to the public are at higher risk, namely physicians [15], but nurses [12,16]. Sex remains a topic of discussion since some results point to greater exposure to violence by male professionals [7,16], while others find this variable to have little or no influence [13,20,21], including a meta-analysis of 65 articles [22]. Age is a factor of vulnerability since younger professionals are more often harassed [5] while personality may contribute (e.g., negative affectivity) to incivility and worker-to-worker violence [23,24]
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