. AQJdemy of Mana t Jouma/

2003, Vol. 48, No.3, 317-326.

THE IMP ACT OF COMMUNITY VIOLENCE ANDAN ORGANIZATION'S PROCEDURAL JUSTICE CLIMATE

ON WORKPLACE AGGRESSION

JOERG DIETZUniversity of Western Ontario

SANDRA L. ROBINSONUniversity of British Columbia

ROBERT FOLGERUniversity of Central Florida

ROBERT A. BARONRensselaer Polytechnic Institute

MAR nN SCIillLZUniversity of British Columbia

This study contrasts community violence and an organization's procedural justiceclimate (or lack thereof) as explanations for employee-instigated workplace aggressionin the geographically dispersed plants of a nationwide organization. The findingsshowed that violent crime rates in the community where a plant resided predictedworkplace aggression in that plant, whereas the plant's procedural justice climatedid not.

dia (e.g.. Henderson & Juris. 1996) and the organi-zational behavior literature (e.g.. Folger & Baron,1996; Greenberg & Alge. 1998; O'Leary-Kelly, Grif-fin, & Glew, 1996). However. despite considerableresearch on the more minor fonns of workplaceaggression (e.g., Skarlicki & Folger, 1997), such astaking overly long breaks as a form of retaliation.empirical studies of the more serious and costlyforms of workplace aggression, such as physicalassaults, are very rare (Neuman & Baron. 1998;Robinson & Bennett, 1995). This study seeks to fillthat gap. It examines antecedents of observed andrecorded physical workplace assaults and other se-vere incidents of workplace aggression, such ascredible threats of physical assault, throwing dan-gerous objects at another employee, and propertydamage-behaviors considered as serious forms ofworkplace aggression (e.g., Neuman & Baron, 1998;O'Leary-Kelly et al.. 1996; Robinson & Greenberg,1998). In doing so, the study addresses two alter-nate perspectives on the causes of workplace ag-gression: (1) external forces emanating from thesocietal violence in the community where an or-ganization resides and (2) internal forces emanatingfrom the organization's procedural justice climate.

In considering external forces behind workplaceaggression. our study addresses the potential spill-over effect of societal violence on workplace ag-

Workplace aggression, or behavior committed byemployees with the intention of harming thosewith whom they work or have worked (e.g., Neu-man & Baron, 1998), continues to be a significantand prevalent organizational problem. Its effectsinclude lowered productivity, increased employeestress and absenteeism (Braverman, 1993), law-suits, increased insurance premiums, tarnishedreputations (e.g., Atkinson, 2000), reduced cus-tomer satisfaction (Walkup, 1999), and costly prop-erty damage. Because of workplace aggression, or-ganizations have to bear considerable costs; thesewere estimated to be $4.2 billion in 1992 (Bensi-mon, 1994) and to have risen in subsequent years(Laabs, 1999).

Not surprisingly, workplace aggression has gar-nered significant attention in both the popular me-

We would like to express our gratitude to MaureenAmbrose and three anonymous reviewers for their in-sightful comments. We also would like to thank JudiMcLean Parks for her comments on earlier versions, andMaura A. Dietz and Nicole N. Nolan for their help in thedata collection. The Social Sciences and Humanities Re-search Council of Canada supported this research with agrant (#410-2002-0637) to the first two authors. A versionof this article was published in the 1998 Academy ofManagement Proceedings.

311

Academy of Management Journal June318

gression, which has been frequently suggested (e.g.,Beugre, 1998) but not empirically examined. Theabsence of research on environmental antecedentsis typical of organizational behavior research,which, for the most part, draws an artificial bound-ary between organization and environment, therebyfailing to consider that organizational behaviormight be as much a product of the forces outside ofan organization as it is a product of the organizationitself. Moreover, from a practitioner's point of view,despite the low frequency of serious acts of aggres-sion, understanding their causes and subsequentlypredicting their occurrence is critical for organiza-tions because of the significant personal and organ-izational costs that are borne when such acts dooccur.

violence in the surrounding environment might in-fluence the degree of aggression within an organi-zation. Adopting the social learning perspective onworkplace aggression (O'Leary-Kelly et al., 1996)but expanding it to include factors that are externalto organizations, we suggest that members of anorganization located in a violent community maylearn aggressive behavior through observationallearning, symbolic modeling, and imitation of theviolence in that community. That is, violent com-munities provide models for aggressive behavior aswell as potential rewards. The social learning ef-fects of violent communities may also include thedesensitization associated with watching aggres-sive models (O'Leary-Kelly et al., 1996).

In sum, when scholars acknowledge that an or-ganization is embedded in and shaped in part by itsenvironment, it follows that violence in the sur-rounding community might affect aggression in theorganization for a variety of interrelated reasons.Hence, we hypothesize:

EXTERNAL FORCES: AN ENVIRONMENT OFSOCIETAL VIOLENCE

The perspective that aggression in U.S. organiza-tions is merely a spillover from violence in societyat large into the workplace may be more than arationalization or self-serving bias by managerswho would like to attribute workplace aggressionto factors beyond their responsibility. It might re-flect the recognition that aggression has multiplecauses (e.g., Berkowitz, 1993a) and is learned inmultiple contexts (e.g., Guerra, Eron, Huesmann,Tolan, &: van Acker, 1997). Nevertheless, whereassome research has suggested a relationship be-tween community-level violence and aggressionwithin schools (e.g., Anderson, 1998; Menacker &Weldon, 1990), to date it is not known if thereexists any relationship between community-levelviolence and aggression within work organizations.

An effect of societal violence on workplace ag-gression would come as no surprise to macro the-orists (e.g., DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer &Rowan, 1977; Scott, 1992, 1995) who for manyyears have emphasized the impact of external en-vironments on organizations. Because an organiza-tion is embedded in the social and cultural frame-works of its environment and hence, at leastpartially, reflects features of the environment(Scott, 1992), Davis and Powell (1992) suggestedthat researchers should include an organization'senvironment in their studies of organizational be-havior. On the basis of Scott's argument that theinformal, normative aspects of an organization canhave their roots in its environment, it is plausiblethat external norms regarding the acceptability ofviolent behavior may transcend organizationalboundaries and, hence, affect workplace aggression.

A social learning perspective (e.g., Bandura,1983) provides one possible explanation of how

Hypothesis 1. The external environment ofviolence surrounding an organization will bepositively related to workplace aggressionwithin that organization.

INfERNAL FORCES: AN ORGANIZAnON'SPROCEDURAL JUSnCE CLIMATE

An alternate perspective on workplace aggres-sion is that it results from an organization's proce-dural justice climate (Naumann & Bennett, 2000)(or the lack thereof) in the form of employee mis-treatment or a perception that general unfairness isa part of the internal workplace environment. Or-ganizational behavior research has repeatedly ad-dressed the relationship between workplace justiceand workplace aggression (e.g., Greenberg & Alge,1998; Skarlicki & Folger, 1997); we extend thisrelationship to the aggregate level (cf. Folger &Skarlicki, 1998) and suggest that an organization'sprocedural justice climate may influence the ag-gression within that organization. Naumann andBennett (2000) defined procedural justice climateas a distinct aggregate-level cognition of how agroup as a whole is treated. Following their lead,we define procedural justice climate as organiza-tion members' shared perceptions of how they aretreated in the workplace. The procedural justiceclimate construct represents a more focused appli-cation of the general concept of workplace cli-mate-the idea that employees retrieve informationfrom salient stimuli to describe and interpret theirwork environment and, in doing so, integrate theirmicroperceptions of workplace events into macro

2003 Dietz. Robinson. Folger. Baron, and Schulz 319

perceptions of climates (e.g., Schneider & Reichers,1983). Hence, an organization's procedural justiceclimate is a "molar" description of the proceduraljustice in the internal work environment ratherthan a description of how a specific organizationmember treats another specific individual at work.

Procedural justice climate may be an antecedentof workplace aggression through two mechanisms,collective reactions to an unjust environment andnormative processes. First, a poor procedural jus-tice climate is associated with an aversive and un-just work environment (cf. Naumann & Bennett,2000). Past research has shown that perceptions ofunfairness are a particularly strong predictor of an-ger, which elicits aggression (e.g., Berkowitz,1993b). Applying this logic to the organizationallevel, a poor procedural justice climate may con-tribute to an affective tone of anger in an organiza-tion (d. George, 1990). Workplace aggressionwithin that organization, hence, may reflect a col-lective expression of that negative affective tone.Second, procedural justice climate may influenceorganizational norms for aggression. When employ-ees collectively believe they are not treated fairly,they perceive the presence of disrespect to them asa whole (cf. Folger, 1993; Lind & Tyler, 1988). Ex-perience or observation of repeated acts of disre-spect often erodes organizational norms for respect-ful and civil behavior (Andersson & Pearson, 1999).This suggests that the dynamics of negative, uncivilbehavior often spread throughout an organization(Andersson & Pearson, 1999), and minor forms ofincivility and disrespect often escalate into more se-vere and harmful ones as a result of "action loops"(Masuch, 1985). Given the above arguments, wehypothesize:

cantly different findings from those reported laterfor the entire sample.

Measures

External environment of violence: Community-level violent crime rates. We averaged the 1992,1993, and 1994 official violent crime rates for thecommunities (cities and towns) in which eachplant was located. The data, which were obtainedfrom the 1993, 1994, and 1995 volumes of the Fed-eral Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Re-ports of the United States, were collected in theyears preceding the occurrence of workplace ag-gression, thus ruling out part-whole relationshipsbetween community violence and workplace ag-gression. The violent crime mte is the number ofmurders, nonnegligent manslaughters, forcible mpes,robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhab-itants for a given year. The average community-levelviolent crime mte was 1,329.94 (s.d. = 834.51), andyear-to-year correlations exceeded .90 (P's < .001).Because the community-level violent crime mte wasskewed, we used its natural logarithm for statisticalanalyses (Weinsberg, 1985).

Plant-level procedural justice climate. Employ-ees voluntarily completed an employee attitudesurvey in 1994. The organization gave us two datasets from this survey: one contained plant-leveldata on each item, and the other contained indi-vidual-level data from a random subsample of5,419 respondents to the survey. The sample prop-erties, which were representative of the organiza-tion, were as follows: 32.4 percent were women;72.0 percent were between 31 and 50 years old; and81.6 percent had been with the organization for atleast six years. The response rate was 79.8 percent.

Using a two-step selection and evaluation proce-dure, from 50 survey items that were about employ-ees' own plants (as opposed to the items about thecompany as a whole or one's immediate supervi-sor), we identified 4 items as strong indicators of aplant's procedural justice climate. We selectedthese four items because they (1) focused on theplant level rather than the individual respondentlevel and (2) were consistent with past research onprocedural justice climates (Naumann & Bennett,2000) in that they reflected both the procedural andinterpersonal aspects of fair treatment. The itemswere as follows: "Supervisors consistently followthe provisions of the national agreements"; "Super-visors/managers often make personnel decisionsbased on favoritism"; "How would you rate yourplant on taking employee interests into accountwhen making important decisions?"; and "Howwould you rate your plant on treating employees

Hypothesis 2. Procedural justice climate willbe negatively related to workplace aggressionwithin an organization.

METHODS

SampleThe sample consisted of 250 geographically dis-

persed and operationally independent plants of anationally operating U.S. public service organiza-tion. Plants had an average of 680 employees (s.d.= 726.00), including plant workers, clerical andsecretarial employees, equipment maintenance em-ployees. and supervisors. The median number ofemployees was 401; most plants (77%) had up to1,000 employees, and only 4 plants (1.5%) hadmore than 3,000 employees. Analyses excludingthese four large plants did not produce signifi-

Academy of Management Journal June320

sion incidents in the first half of the 14-monthperiod were also more likely to have such incidentsin the second half of this period (r = .37, P < .001).Three hundred twelve workplace aggression inci-dents (59 physical assaults and 253 other severe in-cidents of workplace aggression) were reported in 140plants (equivalent to 183 incidents per 100,000 em-ployees), with 64 percent of these incidents havingbeen directed against fellow employees and 36 per-cent against supervisors. The number of workplaceaggression incidents per plant ranged from 0 to 14.

Control variables. We controlled for plant sizeand several community-level variables that are pre-dictors of community-level violence. Plant size(number of employees) was included becauselarger plants were expected to have more incidentsof workplace aggression. For the statistical analy-ses, following Osgood's (2000) recommendation forPoisson-type regressions of aggregated crime data,we used the natural log of plant size. Inclusion ofthe community-level control variables was criticalto demonstrate the unique predictive role of com-munity-level violence for workplace aggression asopposed to community-level variables in general.

Our review of the literature revealed the follow-ing key antecedents of community-level violence:economic deprivation (e.g., Hsieh & Pugh, 1993),family disruption (e.g., Williams & Flewelling,1988), and subcultures of violence (e.g., Huff-Corzine, Corzine, & Moore, 1991). Economic depri-vation was assessed with unemployment rates (e.g.,Chiricos, 1987), the percentage of unemployedmembers of the civilian labor force, and medianhousehold income (e.g., Miethe & Meyer, 1994) asreported by the County and City Data Book 1994from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Family disrup-tion was assessed with divorce rates (e.g., Williams& Flewelling, 1988)-that is, the ratio of divorces tomarriages (National Center for Health Statistics,1984). Subcultures of violence were measured withNisbett and Cohen's (1996) culture of honor cate-gorizations for states (0 = "no culture of honor,"1 = "culture of honor"), indicating the presence orabsence of norms under which violence is toleratedas a response in certain situations (for instance,when a person's reputation is tarnished by anotherperson's actions). Nisbett and Cohen argued thatcertain regions in the United States historically hadpredominantly herding-based economies charac-terized by cultures of honor, which continue to beinfluential in these regions.

with respect and dignity as individuals?" A confir-matory factor analysis of the individual-level dataindicated that these four items formed a unidimen-sional measure that we labeled procedural justiceclimate (~[2, n = 5,279] = 87.53, P < .001, com-parative fit index [CFI] = .99, root-mean-squareerror of approximation [RMSEA] = .09). Coefficientalpha was .80. The measure was also unidimen-sional in the plant-level data <K[2, n = 250] = 3.51,P = .17, CFI = .99, RMSEA = .06).

We statistically justified aggregation (Klein,Dansereau, & Hall, 1994) by examining evidence ofwithin-aggregate-unit agreement and between-unitdisagreement. The median interrater agreementvalue (rwg) was .70, above the .60 cutoff suggestedby James (1982). The ICC(2),1 which indicates in-terrater reliability, was .79, above the .60 criterionsuggested by Glick (1985). The ICC(l), which com-pared the between-plant sum of squares to the totalsum of squares based on the results of a one-wayanalysis of variance (ANOV A) in which plantswere the independent variable, was .07, somewhatbelow the median ICC(l) of .12 observed by James(1982) in the organizational behavior literature.The ANOV A for the computation of the ICC(l)value, however, showed that the plants differed intheir procedural justice climates (F246, 5,151 = 1.67,P oS .001. The consistent pattern from the aboveresults, therefore, justified aggregating our measureof procedural justice climate to the plant level.

Workplace aggression. We obtained the organi-zation's official reports of workplace aggression in-cidents (that is, physical assaults and other severeincidents of workplace aggression) at each of itsplants during a 14-month period (1995-96), as re-corded by the organization's own internal policeforce from statements by the involved parties andwitnesses. These records comprised the organiza-tion's formal reporting system for workplace aggres-sion, and they were electronically stored and used asinput for personnel decisions. We used these recordsto compute workplace aggression counts (the numberof workplace aggression incidents) for each plant.

The workplace aggression records listed assaultsand other severe incidents of employee-instigatedworkplace aggression, such as credible threats ofphysical aggression (for instance, "I will get my gunand kill you"), throwing dangerous objects at an-other employee, and harm to employee property(such as slashed tires). Plants where physical as-saults occurred were also more likely to have othersevere incidents of workplace aggression (r = .36,P < .001). Moreover, plants with workplace aggres- RESULTS

Table 1 shows the means, standard deviations,and intercorrelations of the variables. with plants1 "ICC" stands for intraclass correlation coefficient

Dietz, Robinson, Folger, Baron, and Schulz2003 321

TABLE 1Means, Standard Deviations, and Intercorrelations of Variablesa

Variable s.d.Mean t 2 8 . I 6 7 8

1.20 2.10

679.90 726.00 .43***6.87 2.31 .20**

25,564.51 5,214.49 .0351.96 16.44 .05

0.36 0.48 -.09

.17**

.16*

.10-.12~

-.23***

-.07 .15*

-.14* -.18** .13*

Dependent1. Workplace aggression count

Control2. Plant sizeb3. Unemployment rate4. Median household income5. Divorce rate6. Culture of honor"

Independent7. Community-level violent crime rateb8. Plant-level procedural justice climate

834.55 .26*** .36*** .40*** -.21*** .11~ .26***0.17 -.11~ -.18** -.13* .16* -.06 -.22*** -.26*'

1.329.942.42

an = 250.b Logarithm.

cO, no; 1, yes.'tp < .10* P < .05

** P < .01*** P < .001

was positively associated with the workplace aggres-sion count. The community-level control variableswere not significantly associated with the workplaceaggression count. Contrary to Hypothesis 2, model 2,in which the plant-level procedural justice climatewas added, did not show a significant improvementof fit over modell, and the parameter for proceduraljustice climate was not significant. In model 3, weadded the logarithm of the community-level violentcrime rate. In support of Hypothesis 1, the improve-ment in fit over model I was significant, and thelogarithm of the community-level violent crime ratewas positively associated with the workplace aggres-sion count. The logarithm of the community-levelviolent crime rate explained a unique 3 percent of thevariance in workplace aggression (change in pseudo-~ = .03, likelihood ratio ~ = 6.44, P < .05). In model4, we eliminated the four community-level controlvariables to explore their importance for the model.RemoVing these variables reduced the fit of themodel, but the reduction is not significant, indicatingthat these antecedents of community-level violencewere not important for workplace aggression,whereas community-level violence was. (An OLS re-gression with the workplace aggression rate as thecriterion produced the same pattern of results.)

being the unit of analysis. The logarithm of thecommunity-level violent crime rate was positivelyassociated with the workplace aggression count,whereas the procedural justice climate had a mar-ginally significant, negative zero-order relationshipwith the workplace aggression count.

For the main analyses, we analyzed the work-place aggression count with negative binomial re-gression, a variant of Poisson regression (e.g., Cam-eron &; Trivedi, 1998; Greene, 2000) available in theSAS (Statistical Analysis System) program ProcGenmod. Poisson-type regression of a count wasmore appropriate than ordinary least squares (OLS)regression of a rate because the average aggressioncount per plant was comparatively small, so a non-normal error distribution resulted (Osgood, 2000).Moreover, plant sizes varied across plants, leadingto a violation of the OLS assumption of homoge-nous error variances (cf. Osgood, 2000). Among Pois-son regression variants, we chose negative binomialregression because of its stochastic component,which could account for the overdispersion of ourdependent variable, workplace aggression count(Gardner, Mulvey, &; Shaw, 1995). We computed thelikelihood ratio chi-square statistics for comparisonsof model fit. We also computed pseudo-~ measuresijudge, Griffiths, Hill, Liitkepohl, &; Lee, 1985) usingthe formula 1 - ~/~, where ~ is the log-likelihoodof a given model and ~ is the log-likelihood of themodel containing only an intercept term.

Table 2 shows the parameter estimates for the neg-ative binomial regression models. Model 1 containedthe control variables. As one would expect, plant size

DISCUSSION

This study is one of the first to empirically ex-amine observed severe workplace aggression. Al-though studying acts of extreme workplace aggres-

Academy of Management Journal June322

TABLE 2Negative Binomial Regression Models of Workplace Aggression Counta

Variables Modell Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

-0.28

(0.65)0.42**

(0.16)

IndependentPlant-level procedural justice climate -0.71

(0.67)

-0.54

(0.67)

0.48*

(0.19)

Community-level violent crime rateb

-5.1(O.~

0.;(0.10.(

(0.(0.(

(0.(0.(

(0.(-0.(

(0.:1.:(0.:

-7.65***

(2.52)0.70***

(0.11)0.07

(0.05)0.00

(0.00)0.00

(0.01)-0.11

(0.23)1.23

(0.26)

-9.52***

(2.65)0.60***

(0.11)0.02

(0.05)0.00

(0.00)0.00

(0.01)-0.28

(0.24)1.19

(0.25)

-8.02***

(2.35)0.66***

(0.11)

Control

Intercept

Plant sizeb

Unemployment fate

Median household income

Divorce rate

Culture of honor

1.24

(0.25)Dispersion parameter

-98.8355.49***

5

-98.271.111

-95.056.44*17.55*2

-96.51

2.92

4

Log-likelihoodLog-likelihood ratio testC

Degrees of freedomLog-likelihood ratio testd

Degrees of freedomPseudo-R28 .22 .22 .25 .24

. n = 250. Unstandardized regression coefficients are shown. with standard errors in parentheses.b Logarithm.C For models 2 and 3. the likelihood ratio test assesses the improvement of fit over the preceding model in the table. For model 1. it

assesses the improvement of fit over the intercept-only model. For model 4. it assesses the reduction of fit of model 4 compared to model 3.d Compares model 3 with model 1.. Computed as 1 - ~/Lo. where ~ is the log-likelihood of a given model and Lo is the log-likelihood of the intercept-only model Oudge

et aI.. 1985).* P < .05

** P < .01*** P < .001

surrounding an organization predicted workplaceaggression, indicating a spillover effect. This spill-over effect is particularly noteworthy when oneconsiders that it remained after we controlled forvariables that sociologists have identified as pri-mary predictors of community-level violence: thatis, economic deprivation, family disruption, andsubcultures of violence. On the basis of sociologicalmodels, one might expect that an association be-tween community-level violence and workplaceaggression would disappear if their shared socialcauses were controlled; yet in the current study,this association did not disappear. Instead, the ef-fect of community-level violence on workplace ag~gression was independent of the effects of the com-munity-level control variables, suggesting thatworkplace aggression is not merely community-

sion is very difficult because of their infrequentoccurrence, improving the understanding of theirpotential causes and increasing their predictabilityis extremely useful because these acts can be dev-astating for the organization and the individualsinvolved. In a sample of 250 plants of a large or-ganization with longitudinal data from differentsources, negative binomial regression analysesshowed that violence in the community surround-ing a plant predicted workplace aggression in thatplant, whereas a plant's procedural justice climatedid not.

Implications for Research

Clearly, the most interesting finding from thisstudy is that the level of violence in the community

18***10)

r2***

11))8

)5)10

10)10

)1))5

12)16

16)

Dietz, Robinson, Folger, Baron, and Schulz2003 323

ble (e.g.. Gouldner. 1957). others have suggestedthat such a position reduces the theoretical under-standing of organizational phenomena (e.g.. Brief &Dukerich. 1991). We go so far as to argue that un-derstanding a phenomenon that is beyond organi-zational control may be of both theoretical andpractical value. the latter being briefly discussedbelow.

Implications for Practice

Organizational practitioners have often arguedthat their problem with aggression by employees isa societal problem, yet there is also a tendency totreat cases of workplace aggression individually (cf.Robinson & O'leary-Kelly, 1998). Our finding of acommunity-level violence effect on workplace ag-gression supports the notion that workplace aggres-sion is a partial outgrowth of community-level vi-olence, and this has practical implications for thenature (that is, the level and content) of the inter-ventions organizations use to prevent workplaceaggression. First, managers, who treat cases ofworkplace aggression individually, might be moresuccessful in eliminating workplace aggression ifthey recognized "the necessity for strong actions"(Robinson & O'Leary-Kelly, 1998: 670) at the organ-izational unit level, such as rigorous company pol-icies or unitwide training. Second, if, as we sur-mise, the observed spillover effect reflects rolemodeling, learning, or normative influences on or-ganization members by the community at large,organizations may need to engage in countercul-tural actions to offset the influence of externalforces. Such countercultural actions might includethe use of salient role models engaging in construc-tive behavior, symbolic management, and othermechanisms that reinforce positive organizationalnorms (O'Leary-Kelly et al., 1996). For example,Salomon (1998) described a company that, in aneffort to counter the effects of domestic violence onworkplace aggression, developed a series of train-ing modules for dealing with the perpetrators andvictims of domestic violence in the workplace.

Moreover, the results of this study suggest apotentially important reason why organizationsshould engage in community efforts to curb socialproblems such as violence. Although organizationsthat demonstrate good corporate citizenship cangain improved financial performance (e.g., Wad-dock & Graves, 1997) and customer loyalty (e.g.,Maignan, Ferrell, & Hult, 1999), perhaps they canalso more directly benefit from decreased costs as-sociated with workplace aggression or other devi-ant employee behaviors.

level aggression that occurs in the workplace, but isaffected by it.

Although the study could not directly assess thecauses linking community-level violence andworkplace aggression, our social learning explana-tion appears plausible as we did not find any ef-fects of other community-level variables. Hence,O'Leary-Kelly and colleagues' (1996) social learn-ing model of workplace aggression might beextended to explicitly include not only environ-mental factors within an organization, but also en-vironmental factors outside an organization. Suchan extended theoretical model might encourage fu-ture research such as the examination of the rela-tionships between communal and organizationalnorms for aggression and between workplace ag-gression committed by organizational outsidersand that committed by organizational insiders.Moreover, future research might investigate the in-teresting possibility of an interaction effect be-tween internal and external factors on workplaceaggression. Community-level violence might mod-erate the effect of procedural justice climate onworkplace aggression in such a way that higherlevels of this violence reduce the threshold for ag-gressive behavior (for instance, through desensiti-zation) and, hence, more easily trigger violent reac-tions to a poor procedural justice climate. In otherwords, the relationship between procedural justiceclimate and workplace aggression might be partic-ularly strong in organizations located in highly vi-olent communities (although our data showed nosuch interaction effect).

Our study also has implications for organiza-tional behavior research in general, which tendsnot to examine environmental factors. Our resultsdemonstrate that omission of environmental vari-ables can lead to misspecified models and poten-tially misleading results. Second, these resultsillustrate that researchers who neglect environmen-tal effects might overlook theoretically provocativerelationships (cf. Rousseau & Fried, 2001). For ex-ample, we found relationships between communi-ty-level variables and plant-level procedural justiceclimate. What contributes to such relationships?Might community-level effects as a macro factoralter organizational justice perceptions, and/ormight these effects contribute to actual organiza-tional practices, whereby community-level vari-ables translate into employee mistreatment?

The current neglect of research on environmentaleffects might be a function of the lack of controlthat management has over an organization's exter-nal environment. Although some organizationalscientists have argued that a useful theory ad-dresses factors that are organizationally controlla-

324 Academy of Management Journal June

ues represent esbrnaates of ~e annual savings Inworkplace aggression costs because of ~e morepositive procedural justice climates and lowercommunity-level violent crime rates for plants ~atdid not have workplace aggression Incidents.

Conclusion

Workplace aggression is a complex phenomenonwith multiple causes. Nevertheless, this studydemonstrates the significance of an external envi-ronment of violence to workplace aggression. Wehope that this study will encourage future researchand theorizing, particularly into the implications ofcommunity-level violence for workplace aggres-sion, but also into the potential effects of societalfactors on other organizational behaviors.

Limitations

One limitation of the present study is that we hadto construct the procedural justice climate measurefrom secondary data, which might explain its onlymarginally significant zero-order relationship withworkplace aggression. The measure might be inter-preted alternately, for example, as an indicator oflabor-management relationships. Moreover, de-spite sufficient statistical interrater agreement, themeasure might not appropriately tap "shared" per-ceptions because the items did not refer to respon-dents as one group (cf. Naumann & Bennett, 2000).Finally, all the plants studied here came from oneorganization, which might explain the small be-tween-plant differences in procedural justice cli-mate. These small differences, in turn, attenuatedthe potential effects of procedural justice climate.We believe that our rationales for procedural jus-tice climate effects on workplace aggression war-rant further research, preferably research using themeasure developed by Naumann and Bennett in amultiorganization sample. Such research should,like ours, examine potential community-level ef-fects, given that the initially marginally significantrelationship between procedural justice climateand workplace aggression in our study disappearedonly when it was entered after the community-levelcontrol variables.

Another potential shortcoming of this study isthe relatively small amount of variance explained.This amount of variance, however, must be inter-preted in light of two factors. First, the weak rela-tionships may stem from methodological factors.We consider our findings to be conservative esti-mates, as we assessed predictors and criteria withvery different methods, using unrelated recordsfrom different years. Indeed, we believe that officialrecords of observed behaviors, archived by organi-zational specialists, are some of the better work-place aggression data that can be collected (as op-posed to, for example, memory-based frequencyestimates by employees).

Second and more importantly, even the rela-tively small amount of variance in workplace ag-gression that we explained can translate into sig-nificant cost savings for organizations. Using utilityanalysis procedures (Raju, Burke, & Normand,1990; Schmidt, Hunter, & Pearlman, 1982) and as-suming that the average cost of an incident of work-place aggression was $17,000 (this figure was basedon past estimates [e.g., Bensimon, 1994]), we com-puted an approximate value of $1,100,000 for thecommunity-level violent crime effect and $340,000for the procedural justice climate effect for thewhole organization studied here. These dollar val-

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Joerg Dietz (jdietz@ivey.uwo.ca) is an assistant professorin the Richard Ivey School of Business at the Universityof Western Ontario. He earned his Ph.D. in organizationalbehavior at Tulane University's A. B. Freeman School ofBusiness. His current research interests include employ-ee-customer linkages in service organizations, contextualmodels of workplace aggression, and prejudice in theworkplace.

Sandra L. Robinson is an associate professor in the Fac-ulty of Commerce at the University of British Columbiaand holds a Distinguished University Scholar Chair. Sheearned her Ph.D. in organizational behavior at North-western University. Her current research interests in-clude workplace deviance and aggression, trust, betrayal,and territoriality in organizations.

Robert Folger is a professor of management at the Uni-versity of Central Florida. He earned his Ph.D. in socialpsychology from the University of North Carolina atChapel Hill. His current research interests include work-place motivation and matters of behavioral ethics, in-cluding organizational justice, trust, and retaliatory aswell as conciliatory sequences of events.

Robert A. Baron is the Wellington Professor of Manage-ment and a professor of psychology at Rensselaer Poly-technic Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in 1968 from theUniversity of Iowa. His research and consulting activitiesfocus primarily on (1) social and cognitive factors inentrepreneurship, (2) workplace aggression and violence,and (3) effects of aspects of physical environments (suchas lighting and air quality temperature) on productivity.

Martin Schulz is an associate professor at the Faculty ofCommerce and Business Administration, University ofBritish Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from StanfordUniversity in 1993. His research interests include organ-izational learning, organizational knowledge, organiza-tional rules, bureaucracies, organization design, businessprocess reengineering, multinational corporations, math-ematical models, and quantitative methods.

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