Nurse Lateral Violence In The Workplace Essay

Nurse to Nurse Horizontal Violence: Bullying in the Workplace Nurse to nurse lateral violence is a common occurrence in the workplace. It is something that brings down staff moral, causes high turnover rates, and costs the employer thousands of dollars a year. Many studies have been done that explore lateral violence in the nursing workplace which all conclude that there is a negative impact of lateral violence in the present and will continue to cause problems that can affect the future of nursing.

Literature Review Christie and Jones (2014) reviewed lateral violence in nursing, who it affects, and what can cause lateral violence to take place. Lateral violence also known as workplace bullying is considered to be an inappropriate behavior

Hospitals were unable to recruit nurses to come and work, there was an increased turnover rate in employment, and lateral violence also caused damaged relationships. Low self-esteem, depression, self-hatred, negative patient outcomes, and feelings of powerlessness were also key consequences associated with lateral violence.

Their research had shown that 60% of new nurses were more likely to leave their place of employment in the first 6 months. They determined that lateral violence can result in social, psychological, and physical consequences. McKenna et al (2003) described lateral violence in first year nurses across all clinical settings. Lateral violence in this study was shown to more commonly take the form of psychological harassment, meaning that people experiencing lateral violence were verbally abused, received threats, were intimidated and humiliated, received criticism, and were denied many opportunities. Although many workers in the nursing field have experienced this type of lateral violence they very rarely reported these incidents because of a fear of retaliation. When reviewing questionnaires sent out to nurses on the matter of lateral violence it was found that close to half of all participants in this study were less than thirty years of age; this supported the assumption that lateral violence among nurses mostly occurs from senior nurses to new nurses. The study found that many of the behaviors that were experienced by new graduate nurses were covert in nature and that direct verbal threats were also likely to occur in the nursing