From Workplace‐Based to Work‐Related Violence: Reframing <scp>HRM</scp> Research and Practice in the Era of Growing Tensions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Violence at work has traditionally been conceptualized in human resource management (HRM) as workplace‐based violence—an episodic, interpersonal issue occurring within bounded organizational settings. This perspective article adopts the term work‐related violence as a more expansive and timely framing, encompassing physical, psychological, and symbolic harm related to work but occurring across dispersed geographies, identities, relationships, and organizational arrangements. It contends that prevailing HRM frameworks remain ill‐equipped to address these fragmented and often unacknowledged harms, particularly as work becomes increasingly hybrid, precarious, and digitally mediated. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, we advance a multilevel and multistakeholder analytical framework that theorizes violence as relational and spatially unbounded, embedded across micro (identity and employees' lived experience, and psychological factors), meso (organizational culture, HRM systems and silencing mechanisms), and macro (regulatory, ideological, and institutional) levels. The framework further identifies underexplored domains of violence within HRM, including employee‐perpetrated violence, ideologically motivated aggression, and the critical role of community‐based interventions in mitigating harm. In doing so, the article contributes to HRM theory by problematizing the spatial and behavioral assumptions underpinning conventional approaches to workplace violence. We argue for a broadened research and practice agenda that expands the field's analytical and operational capacity, calling for the development of HRM models that are structurally, institutionally, and ideologically attuned to violence emerging from inequality, institutional complicity, and the broader political economies of contemporary work.

Topics & Concepts