ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on forms of harassment and antisocial behaviors that currently are not covered under most state, provincial, and federal laws. Workplace aggression has been classified as either verbal or physical, passive or active, and direct or indirect. Workplace aggression is more often verbal than physical, putting it firmly in the sphere of communication. One of the most common dysfunctional work behaviors is verbal aggression. This includes both direct and indirect verbal actions. Nonverbal aggression or passive-aggressive tactics may include dirty looks, aggressive or obscene gestures, hiding needed resources, sabotage of someones workplace, being intentionally late to meetings, delaying work to make others look bad, malicious mischief-making, failure to return messages, refusing to talk to someone, or failure to warn management of potential problems. Verbal aggressiveness is different from argumentativeness. Lacking federal or state laws that regulate bullying, organizations are on their own in deciding how to respond.
