Verbal Threats Top List of Violent Acts

More than half of American companies have experienced at least one incident of workplace violence in the last three years, according to a national survey scheduled to be released next week.

Few of the incidents, however, were on the scale of Tuesday’s shooting in Honolulu.

The survey, by the Society for Human Resource Management, found that shootings and stabbings accounted for only 2% of the incidents. The most common violent acts were verbal threats (41%) and “pushing and shoving” (19%).

“What happened in Hawaii is tragic, but it’s also atypical,” said Kristin Accipiter, a spokeswoman for the Arlington, Va.-based trade association.

The study, complied from surveys filled out by human resource managers at 681 companies, found that 55% of the incidents involved “personality conflicts” between employees. Only 8% were directed by an employee against his or her supervisor.

In 76% of the cases, the aggressors were men, and in 45%, the victims were women. Firings were the catalyst for just 18% of the violent incidents, according to the survey. Work-related stress accounted for 24%.

Most companies, the survey found, have taken a number of steps to prevent violence, with 68% having written policies addressing the issue.

The office shooting rampage has become a periodic fixture in America since the late 1980s. Among the most notorious was the 1986 killing of 14 people at a post office in Edmond, Okla., by postal worker Pat Sherrill, 44, who later took his own life.

More recently, in 1997, four people were shot to death at a Caltrans maintenance yard in Orange. The gunman, Arturo Reyes Torres, 43, blamed one of the victims--his ex-boss--for getting him fired. Torres was later shot by police.

In August, Alan Miller, 34, was charged with killing two co-workers at their office in Pelham, Ala., then killing a third person at a company where he used to work.