ABSTRACT

Introduction As the previous chapter demonstrated, existing responses to workplace psychological abuse are largely reactive rather than prevention-focused. This chapter focuses on what we can learn from environmental criminology and situational crime prevention (SCP) to help illuminate more promising avenues towards the prevention of psychological violence/abuse in the workplace. While governments and organisations in most developed countries have introduced policies based on the traditional psychological perspective, these appear to be largely ineffective in preventing or resolving this problem (see, e.g., Di Martino et al., 2003; Rayner and McIvor, 2006; Hutchinson, 2012). Hutchinson (2012) attributes these policy failures to the misplaced emphasis on individual factors related to psychological abuse in the workplace and the simultaneous neglect of significant organisational and cultural factors. The oversimplified, individualized perspective on which much policy is based fails to adequately explain the complex phenomenon of psychological abuse in the workplace and, as a consequence, it fails to provide an effective response to the causes or predictors of this problem (Di Martino et al., 2003). Much of the literature that explores factors related to psychological harm in the workplace focuses on abuses of power by managers/supervisors who cause or threaten harm or disadvantage to subordinates while highlighting the pathology of the individual manager/supervisor (Hutchinson, 2012) and the personality and behaviour of the target (e.g. Aquino and Bradfield, 2000). While the problem is viewed as an interpersonal one between or among individuals who simply choose to behave badly, the organisation is portrayed as predictable, rational (Pfeffer, 1981; cited in Hutchinson, 2012) and distant from the processes involved in facilitating psychological violence.