Relational Aggression in the Nursing Workplace Environment

Relational Aggression (RA), sometimes known as female bullying, drama, or "mean girls," is more common among women than men, especially during the formative adolescent years. While several studies on "lateral" or "horizontal" nurse-nurse violence have been reported, RA between workers of equal rank and job description is just one piece of the bad behavior pie, since RA occurs between nurses and unit clerks, physicians, and even patients.

The purpose of these analyses was to: 1) Test The Relational Aggression Scale for reliability of use with health care workers, and 2) Compare and contrast RA and other variables of interest between physicians and nurses. For this study, the original instrument (previously validated with college students) was modified for use in the work environment with males as well as females.

The Relational Aggression Scale data were gathered online at a large academic medical center, where there was some trepidation about measuring and reporting negative behaviors. The investigators overcame this by visiting as many of the care units as possible prior to data collection, explaining the study purpose and the nature of the data.

Once open participation in online data collection ended, descriptive statistics were used to describe the sample of 953 nurses and 205 physicians. The Relational Aggression Scale identifies three categories of behavior (Aggressor, Victim, In-Betweener). Significance testing revealed that nurses had significantly more experience as "Victims" while physicians were higher on "Aggressor" (p=.02). RA and Institutional Commitment were also significantly different by RA role (p=.003).

These data are a preliminary exploration of a topic that strikes a nerve wherever it seems to land: bullying. While our sample of nurses were predominantly female, further evaluation of data will reveal whether RA differs according to gender, type of unit, and age.