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Ricky W. Griffin and Anne M. O'Leary-Kelly (Editors). The Dark Side of Organizational Behavior. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004, 515 pages, $53.00 hardcover.
With the ever-increasing focus on employee discrimination and harassment, corporate scandals, and blurred ethics in our society, it seems natural that scholars would begin focusing on why the negative, or "dark side," behaviors leading to these outcomes occur as well as the effects on the person and the organization. In this book, editors Griffin and O'Leary-Kelly make it very clear that their goal is to "explore and reveal the true nature of the dark side as applied to organizational behavior." As noted in the preface, this book is the result of the collaboration between several contributors with expertise in various dark-side behaviors including workplace aggression and violence, employee discrimination, and negative interpersonal influence.
To accomplish their goals, the editors have divided the 16 chapters of the book into an introduction and four parts. Part I focuses on workplace aggression and violence, Part II addresses workplace discrimination and the dark side, Part III discusses the dark side of interpersonal influence, and Part IV represents several issues that did not necessarily fit neatly into the first three sections.
In the first chapter of Part I, Baron reviews the basic research and theories of workplace aggression and violence. He provides the reader with insights on the nature and causes of aggression and violence from both a situational and a dispositional standpoint and outlines some strategies for its reduction in the workplace.
Turning to the causes of aggression in the workplace in particular, in Chapter 2, Neuman discusses how injustice and stress can lead to workplace aggression if left unchecked. In addition, he provides a model for understanding the relationships between the variables that he presents throughout the chapter and describes a study currently underway to test the model. Then, Reeves explores the effects of domestic violence when carried over into the workplace in the final chapter of Part I. By discussing a largely unstudied topic, this chapter integrates research on intimate partner violence with organizational research and its implications.
Shifting to a focus on discrimination in...