The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 57 empirical studies (59 samples) concerning enacted workplace aggression to answer 3 research questions. First, what are the individual and situational predictors of interpersonal and organizational aggression? Second, within interpersonal aggression, are there different predictors of supervisor- and coworker-targeted aggression? Third, what are the relative contributions of individual (i.e., trait anger, negative affectivity, and biological sex) and situational (i.e., injustice, job dissatisfaction, interpersonal conflict, situational constraints, and poor leadership) factors in explaining interpersonal and organizational aggression? Results show that both individual and situational factors predict aggression and that the pattern of predictors is target specific. Implications for future research are discussed.

Whether referred to as deviance, antisocial behavior, or retaliation, workplace aggression is a significant issue facing organizations. Empirical research has focused on its prediction and consequences, and theoretical reviews have attempted to integrate the diverse literatures on workplace aggression (e.g., Martinko, Gundlach, & Douglas, 2002; Spector & Fox, 2005). For instance, Martinko et al. (2002) drew on a causal reasoning framework to develop a model of workplace aggression, which proposes that both individual and situational differences predict either self-destructive or retaliatory aggression, depending on the cognitive processing of the aggressor. More recently, Spector and Fox (2005) identified common items from different measures of aggression, demonstrating that despite different labels (e.g., aggression, deviance, retaliation), the actual measurement of these constructs may be the same. Taken together, such efforts at integrating the workplace aggression literature are an important first step in making sense of these phenomena; however, important empirical and methodological questions remain.

Two issues concerning conceptual differences among forms of workplace aggression and their predictors have emerged in the literature. The first issue concerns the conceptualization of workplace aggression, and in particular whether aggression is target specific. We define target specificity as the propensity to aggress against...