Creating Healthier Work Environments: Eliminating Lateral Violence

Dahlby, Mara A

Friday, April 12, 2013

Mara A Dahlby, RN, BSN
Department of Nursing, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN

Learning Objective 1: The learner will be able to describe common behaviors and consequences associated with lateral violence.

Learning Objective 2: The learner will be able to identify one center's approach to combating lateral violence in the workplace and its effectiveness.

Impaired personal relationships between nurses at work cause errors, accidents, and poor work performance. Nursing is a high stress job that generates pressures that are often vented when stressors are added. This venting can result in lateral violence. Lateral violence is described as disruptive, disparaging or uncivil behavior inflicted by one peer on another (Dimarino, 2011). The result is an unpleasant work environment that has harmful effects on individual nurses, team members, patients, and significant financial implications for the organization. Acts of lateral violence most commonly include nonverbal innuendo, verbal insults, gossiping, undermining, withholding information, sabotaging, in-fighting, scapegoating, backstabbing, failure to respect privacy, and broken confidences.

Significant gaps exist in the recognition of lateral violence in the workplace, knowledge of the concept of lateral violence, and knowledge of methods to overcome lateral violence in the workplace. There is much support in the literature for the practice of cognitive rehearsal and conflict management skills as effective interventions for nursing staff to use to combat lateral violence (Griffin, 2006; Rowell, 2007).

An educational intervention was developed and implemented on two nursing units. Education focused on identifying lateral violence, the practice of cognitive rehearsal, and teaching conflict management skills to combat the presence of lateral violence in the workplace with the outcome of decreasing the perceived presence of lateral violence in each work unit. The identified units’ staff participated in a pre and post survey to determine the perceived presence of lateral violence in the work unit and the familiarity of what constitutes lateral violence.

This poster will describe how the desired outcomes were met as a result of the educational intervention and as identified by the pre and post surveys. The implications for nursing are great as the consequences of lateral violence are costly to individuals, the nursing professions, institutions, and patients.

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