The impact of third-party aggression on Italian and Irish employees’ well-being and job satisfaction

Third-party workplace aggression represents a serious threat to workplace safety and organizational well-being. Nevertheless, existing research on workplace aggression has been mainly restricted to situations involving intra-organizational members. To fill this gap, the current dissertation concentrates on third-party workplace aggression. Third-party workplace aggression may manifest itself through a tremendous range and variety of acts which may be perpetrated by unknown persons outside the organization who have no legitimate relationship to it (i.e., external), or by someone who is either the recipient of or the object of a service provided (i.e., client-initiated; CAL/OSHA, 1998). The current dissertation examines two client-initiated forms of workplace aggression, namely customer incivility and verbal aggression, and two external expressions of workplace aggression, namely robberies and thefts at work. In doing so, it focuses on the service sector because generally workers who have face-to-face communication with customers tend to report the highest levels of incidence of both client-initiated (e.g., customer incivility and verbal aggression) and external (thefts and robberies at work) workplace aggression (Mayhew & Chappell, 2001).