The Scope of Client Aggression Toward Social Workers in Israel and Its Organizational Antecedents

Background:

Aggressive client-behavior toward social-workers is expressed at the organizational, group, interpersonal, and personal levels and interrupts normal conduct inside and outside the organization. Aggressive-behaviors may emanate from various ecological levels in the organizational environment,  the results are verbally or physically aggressive-behavior, also possibly manifesting as threats and property-damage.

The goal of the present-study was to assess the prevalence of client violence in Israel, and examine some possible antecedents. It was hypothesized that aggressive culture in the workplace; client exposure to workers’ aggression; inadequate service conditions; and workload stress will be all organiztional level antecendents associated with clients’ aggressive behavior. 

Methods:

A cross-sectional survey design was used, using a stratified random sample of 700 social workers, working in municipal social work agencies in Israel (Leshachot Revaha). Questionnaires were delivered to all participants during staff meetings, and collected later by the researchers in sealed envelopes. The return rate was 92.14% (645 out of a total of 700 questionnaires delivered). The age of participants ranged from 20 to 67 (M = 41.64, SD = 10.21); 556 (86.2%) were females; and participants’ experience ranged from two months to 42 years (M = 10.18, SD = 8.38). The survey has used known measures of client violence, aggressive culture at the workplace, client exposure to workers aggression, workload stress, and inadequate service conditions. All instruments had acceptable internal reliability (Chronbach’s Alpha). Analysis consisted of descriptive statistics and OLS regression models.

Results:

Exposure to client violence over a period of 3 months, was about 71% for verbal-aggression. Threats were experienced by 69% of the participants, while of the severe types of aggression, exposure to property damage was close to 11% for the last three months. Finally, not surprisingly, exposure to physical violence was close to 4% over the last three months, and somewhat less than 9% were exposed once or more during their careers. In terms of antecedents, exposure to verbal aggression and threats, as well as the combined measure of exposure, is predicted only by employees’ workload. Male workers are almost three times more prone to be exposed to property damage than females. Similarly, male workers are about five times more prone to be exposed to physical violence from clients. Physical violence exposure is also predicted by aggressive culture in the agency and by client exposure to workers’ aggression.

Conclusions and Implications:

The findings highlight two broad axes related to client aggressiveness: frequency and level of aggression. With respect to frequency, we can discern a continuum running from common types of aggressive behaviors to rare ones. The other axis focuses on the level of aggressiveness used, from minor types of client aggression, such as verbal assaults and threats, increasing to more severe ones, such as property damage, and finally to physical injury. Social workers in the agencies are exposed to mild types of aggression on an ongoing and almost daily basis. According to our findings, the different levels of aggression directed at social workers are positively correlated. These results are in line with studies that were conducted in other countries.