‘Where everybody knows your name’: Lessons from small business about preventing workplace violence

Recently, we have seen a number of high profile examples of workplace violence. Large organizations are armed with many of the programs that have been developed to minimize the occurrence of workplace violence. In contrast, smaller organizations—which constitute the majority of businesses in the United States—possess neither the resources nor the manpower to implement the aforementioned programs. Additionally, due to a number of individual, social, and situational factors, small businesses appear to be more vulnerable to workplace violence than large businesses. Despite these disadvantages, however, it seems that small businesses do not experience higher levels of workplace violence than their more sizeable counterparts. In this article, we uncover a number of small business practices that may counteract the threat of workplace violence, and proffer these as lessons for all managers who wish to work toward that goal.