hat comes over a person who suddenly launches into a rage during a meeting and threatens his business associates?

Where does one person acquire the entitlement that lets her or him berate, humiliate, demean, and belittle others at will, without any seeming idea that what they are doing is soiling everyone?

I once worked with a really down to earth charge nurse on a locked unit of a dual-diagnosis hospital. I've never forgotten what she said to me one day after we both watched a couple of other staff behaving badly. She said: "Don't sh-in your own nest."

Unfortunately, many organisations in Bermuda and elsewhere in the world have employees who do just that.

This year researchers at Queen's University, Ontario, Memorial University, Newfoundland, and Northwestern University, Illinois published a joint study of research on workplace aggression, and they discovered some interesting facts.

They were building off a large body of previous research establishing that aggressive behaviour is related to cognitive processing (the way a person makes meaning out of his or her experience), negative affect (feelings of anxiety, fear, and hostility), self-regulation (which is related to what neuropsychologists now call the "executive functions" governing organisation, attention, creative problems solving, the ability to switch from one thing to another or inhibit impulsiveness), and social information processing (which is the ability to identify appropriate social responses).

They found that aggression is target specific ? it's directed toward a person (yelling at someone at work) or the organisation itself (damaging property or impeding productivity).

What leads a person to do such things? Both individual characteristics and situational factors contribute to acts of aggression. The individual characteristics of trait anger (in which people feel provoked out of a low frustration tolerance), negative affectivity, gender, age, and alcohol use all contribute to higher levels of aggression.

The situational factors of systemic disorganisation, unfairness of outcomes (rewards for work accomplished, advancements, recognitions, opportunities, et cetera), unfairness of the procedures used to arrive at such outcomes, interpersonal conflict as a workplace cultural norm, and situational constraints that interfere with the ability to get work done likewise all contribute to acts of aggression.

Where these individual and situational factors interact, a particularly volatile brand of aggression is likely to emerge.

Other researchers have discovered that some forms of aggressive behaviour are actually retaliation for perceived interpersonal injustice. Interpersonal justice is the respect that leads one to treat others with dignity and courtesy.

It is also the propriety that leads someone to refrain from improper comments. It is concerned with fairness and equity between individuals. When someone feels disrespected and encroached upon, or treated unfairly, they will likely retaliate as a means of restoring balance.

This is especially the case for individuals who experience high levels of trait anger and hostility, for they routinely perceive situations as being unfair.

With these things in mind, it occurs to me that Bermuda is a perfect breeding ground for workplace aggression. The perceived injustices and inequities between Bermudians and ex-pats (coming from both sides), and the social offence that some feel because of race, along with organisational dysfunction in various forms in some companies, create either an icy standoff between people or heated conflict.

To be sure, this is not always the case. In many workplace environments there exists what might be called ministers of grace ? people who dispense undeserved favour, restore dignity, support equity and justice, and promote the well being of all. I wish I could always be one of them, but I have to confess that even at this age some situations seem to get the better of me.

I can usually put up with a lot when it's directed at me, but if I hear that someone has been behaving badly toward someone I care about, I find myself entertaining fantasies. I clothe them in the attire of witty posturing, saying how I'd like to apply some "two-by-four reasoning" to the forehead of such and such a person. Or I say that I'm going to have to have a talk with that person, and what I mean is that I would like to get right into their face.

Now, for me, there is an accountability to all that, for God tends to get right into MY face ? about my attitude. What happens, though, in people who don't have such a counsellor?

Perhaps they don't even realise what they are doing, and they are just living in the rush of bravado and adrenalin.

Who will come along side to help? Who will get between them and disaster and, like a friend, pull them out of the ditch of self-destruction?